Apple, Google World's Top Brands

Anil Kandangath writes "BrandChannel readers have picked the top global brands for 2004. Apple is the leader, closely followed by Google. Arab-centric Al-Jazeera ranks fifth in global as well as Europe/Africa ratings. In regionwise ratings, Google tops North America, Ikea tops Europe/Africa, Sony tops Asia-pacific while Mexican cement brand Cemex tops Latin America An interesting fact is that Steve Jobs headed Apple is the top North American brand while his other venture Pixar comes fifth in the same zeitgeist."

Comments

3 out of the top 10 from US and Canada are people

[xmas2003]

Impressive (or perhaps sad?) that 3 of the top 10 "brands" in US and Canada are people - The Donald, Martha, and Oprah.

Too bad my favorite Big Green Guy didn't make the list! ;-)

It must be true

[Anonymous Coward]

because a tiny niche insignificant internet website says so !!

Re:It must be true

[nomadic]

because a tiny niche insignificant internet website says so !!

It's not false information just because a tiny niche insignificant internet website said so.

It's false because marketing people said so.

I call BS!

[Anonymous Coward]

Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds...whatever

Re:I call BS!

[l4m3z0r]

While Coke, Pepsi, McDonalds, Walmart etc. are all bigger companies they don't have the same visibility in the media as Apple, Pixr, Al-Jazeera etc. No one is hyping it up about some new coke product, I didn't hear about any keynot speechs from the McDonalds CEO unveiling the latest burger trends. And pepsi didn't introduce some new product recently that dominated some new part of the market they previously weren't represented in.

The fact is the three brands you mentioned are all transparent. I have my preferences of Coke vs. Pepsi, McDonalds vs. Burger King etc but they don't have the cult following. We ignore those brands because they are giant and stable, they aren't taking any risks and they plainly don't have the media love that jobs and his babies have.

Re:I call BS!

[furball]

You need to think a little more clearly on this. They have visibility but if I drop you in the middle of Africa with a 12-pack of Coke and Google T-shirt guess which brand the natives are going to recognize?

Brands are very difficult thing to build. Apple/Google are currently (rightly so) should be monitored but they haven't built their brands to be recognizable world-wide yet.

For the record, Coke still stands as the #1 most recognizable brand in the world. Best of luck toppling that monstrosity.

Re:I call BS!

[Reignking]

Right but you are still ignoring the fact that no one consciously thinks about the Coke brand.

That sounds like a great brand, established to me, then. Apple, Google, etc are simply more "buzzworthy" because they are new(er), growing, and high-tech.

Re:I call BS!

[BasilBrush]

But the list wasn't the "most recognisable", it was "most global impact". Coke is well known, but it has little impact. It's familiar and boring. If there's an article about Coke and one about Apple, people are probably going to be more interested in Apple. More to the point, if there are two ads side by side with Coke and Apple logos on, people are going to look at the Apple one.

Re:I call BS!

[Queer Boy]

Apple/Google are currently (rightly so) should be monitored but they haven't built their brands to be recognizable world-wide yet.

Apple has been around 30 years and they aren't recognisable worldwide yet?

None suprised me

[digitalgimpus]

I can't say 1 of them shocked me.

Then again, I think with the advent of the net, things are changing.

10 years ago, not many of us Americans would know so many European brands, but now that we see ads for european products (even if they aren't available in the US), articles, etc. etc...

it's sometimes hard to remember what is in the US or not.

I'm guessing in another 10 years, that continental divide will close even more.

Coke?

[YouHaveSnail]

Amazing that Apple and Pixar both beat Coca-Cola! I'm a big fan of both, but it's hard to imagine that Coke doesn't have a larger following worldwide.

Re:Coke?

[gowen]

Right. And its pretty funny/idiotic to suggest that in a world where global internet connectivity is about 1%, that Google is one of the top brands.

Laughable.

Re:Coke?

[drinkypoo]

Most of people in a position to buy stuff based on a brand name have internet access. Much of the world is destitute by our standards, mainly because they are living as they have been for hundreds of years and they don't have all the plastic shit we do.

Re:Coke?

[nutshell42]

3.5e6*100/0.5=7e8

That's off by about factor 10. Sorry for causing any psychological harm by pointing out the insignificance of your nation but look at the bright side. Had you been right the USA would have about 50% of the world population and I don't think the rest of the world could survive that =)

Re:Coke?

[0x461FAB0BD7D2]

The reason why Google is one of the top brands is given at the end of the article:

"A total of 1,984 brandchannel readers from 75 countries voted online between November and December 2004."

The keyword is online.

Re:Coke?

[Bertie]

No, it was more the fact that they were trying to pass off tap water with additives as a premium product. They completely misjudged the market, which is driven by the perception that bottled water is purer and more natural and better for you. They seemed to think that people just wanted it to taste nice, and that the way to make it taste the way they wanted was to mass-produce it with minerals added in artificially to keep the taste consistent. I've never seen such embarrassingly negative launch publicity for anything, and I'm counting the Segway in that.

Then less than a month after it launched, just when we'd all stopped laughing, they had to withdraw it from sale because of abnormal levels of some toxic chemical or other. It never came back.

Still, I'm sure it'll provide marketing textbook authors with case study material for decades to come.

Re:Coke?

[Herbmaster]

I'm not sure what they think they're measuring in this survey, so it's kind of futile. Coke's product offerings are pretty limited. Under the Coca-Cola/Coke brand, they sell cola, reduced-calorie cola, and flavored cola. The company makes any other products, but they don't even call it "Coca-Cola brand lemon-lime soft drink" - they call it "Sprite" with no mention of the Coke brand in the name. Sure lots of people all over the world recognize this made up phrase, but so what? The term is practically generic.

Apple and Google, OTOH, have really strong brands in the sense that those names are worth money in the market. If tomorrow Apple came out with a cell phone, a PDA, a digital wristwatch, and a Swedish-made penis enlarger pump, they could price their new wares at a premium, and still shift a million units in a day. All in business areas they're not currently in. For another example, when Froogle came out, I was excited to use it, because it was from Google. Even before anyone had used it, they had already earned karma with me because I knew their name. Lots of people are speculating about a Google browser next. Surely it will get a lot of downloads the day it comes out, if it ever does. Will more people drink another Coke? Sure, but there's only so many things the Coca-Cola people can stick the name Coke on and sell, and there's only so much money they can charge for that name.

Re:Coke?

[Octagon Most]

"They completely misjudged the market, which is driven by the perception that bottled water is purer and more natural and better for you."

That perception is mostly wrong. Dasani may in fact be purified tap water and thus considered less "natural" than spring water, but at least in the U.S. is subject to higher standards of purity than the much less regulated spring water market. In addition I just read a bottled water taste test (in think in a wine-related publication) that ranked Dasani the second best tasting water behind a brand I had never heard of. There's a lot of perception and subjectivity at work here and Coke applied their knowledge of image-building to make Dasani appear to be more than it is, but none of that means that it cannot well be the superior product. I don't have an opinion on Dasani but the masses can just as easily be swayed by a groundswell of media-induced backlash as they can by the best marketing campaign.

"North America" ?

[AtariAmarok]

It appears that their North America ratings leave out a large number of countries from Mexico south to the Colombian border which are also part of North America.

Steve Jobs

[pHatidic]

Steve Jobs strength is that he makes good decisions. However a lot of Apple's loyalty can be attributed to Guy Kawasaki, who is credited with creating the image that attracts crazed fanboys. /crazed fanboy

Re:Steve Jobs

[LakeSolon]

Wow, it's been a while since I've seen that name. I remember always looking forward to the latest MacUser and MacWorld magazines to read Guy Kawasaki and and Andy Inhakto... Inhanitko? Inakto? Errr. He actually wrote a column once on the premise of how impossible it was to spell his name so I don't feel too bad not getting it right.

Great Folks. Anyone feel like saving me the Googling (speaking of brands) and give a first person account of what's become of them?

~Lake

Zeitgeist

[Anonymous Coward]

i love it when people use words thinking they are clever when they dont even understand the meaning of them

Zeitgeist is a German word. Zeit meaning "time" and Geist meaning "ghost," Zeitgeist means the spirit of the age or times

so i the context used in the summary it is a completely inappropriate usage, but as Google use it for their statistics page it must be cool

Starbucks (Off Topic)

[gowen]

Seeing Starbucks in there reminded me of a great ad I saw in Sunday's paper. Wales is now advertising itself as a tourist destination based on its historical heritage, and the fact it's still relatively unspoiled by the various global brands that homogenise most city centres in England. The advert is a double page photo of the inside of Cardiff Castle with the slogan

"Wales :
641 Castles
5 Starbucks."

Re:3 out of the top 10 from US and Canada are peop

[k4_pacific]

Well, they are brands. Martha Stewart Living? Her name is the brand. There's of people who've turned their names into brands:

Vidal Sassoon
Tommy Hilfiger
Colonel Sanders
Antoine Bugleboy
Lazslo Panaflex
etc.

The list goes on and on.

Why?!?

[M3rk1n_Muffl3y]

Why is Europe and Africa lumped together into one category? Is it the similar demographics?

Sample size

[Ruger]

Wow! A whopping 1984 respondents worldwide, of which the US& Canada make up about 50%. Seems a bit skewed to me.

Ruger

Re:Sample size

[Dun Malg]

I agree. For example, Cemex seems to be the top brand in Latin America. Well, I'm from Argentina and neither I nor anyone I know have ever heard of it.

That's because you have wood in Argentina. In Mexico, wood is outrageously expensive. For years the most popular building materials have been brick and cement block. For the last couple decades, though, Cemex has been pushing cast concrete structures. They do more than just make cement. They also provide loans to contractors to buy the casting equipment, arrange discounts on building materials, and generally act as a one-stop contractor's consultant. Basically, if anything is being built in Mexico, you can bet that Cemex is involved.

Interesting side effect of the scarcity of wood in Mexico is that Mexico City, a city of 25 million or so, has only like three fire trucks, because nothing ever really burns there.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Is Slashdot's an advertising bitch for Apple?

[Phiu-x]

At any given time since a couple of weeks there's a front story about Apple. Now the Apple Mini and IShuffle were news. But now this one and yesterday it was about a loser who crammed pc parts in the Mac Mini. Is Apple's the new google?

Re:Is Slashdot's an advertising bitch for Apple?

[OmniVector]

in some ways, sure. apple's done a lot to change their image not only for street cred (iPod) but geek cred too (BSD in OS X). google changed the way we use search engines -- such a simple webpage can find so much. apple's changing the way we think about technology now more than ever with the digital lifestyle of iLife + iPod + iMac.

Google or Apple?

[NicolaiBSD]

In regionwise ratings, Google tops North America
...
An interesting fact is that Steve Jobs headed Apple is the top North American brand

So which one is it?

Re:What a crock

[khallow]

From the article:

The shortlist comprises brands that were highly visible that year. Write in votes carry equal weight to listed brands unless the brand is already listed in the shortlist, in which case we accept up to 10 write ins for one brand.

In other words, they picked the shortlist of brands that you could vote on and the gentle readers got to rubberstamp the choice.

bogus survey

[theMerovingian]

This was the "Reader's Choice" award for brandchannel.com. As an online survey, it would be heavily weighted towards technology companies such as Apple and Google.

Brands such as Q-tips, Kleenex, Jell-O, Cheerios, Jiff, the Green Bay Packers, and Tide all probably have higher recognition rates as a percentage of the total (US) population.

Interesting comparison...

[GillBates0]

with the 2004 Google Zeitgeist.

Google's search statistics may be regarded as a similar but more accurate poll because of the much bigger sample space.

The problem is that their statistics are biased towards brands/corporations which have a bigger web presence (eg Amazon, etc) which occur in their "Top Consumer Brands" category. Hence companies like Cemex, Samsung etc do not figure in the Google Zeitgeist.

On a related note, SCO seems to be proud it figured in the Google Zeitgeist. The following quote from the "news" on their webpage (couldn't find permanent link):

SCO Ranked #1 Corporate Query Site by Google. Based on billions of searches conducted by Google users around the world, the 2004 Year-End Zeitgeist ranks SCO's corporate Website as the most searched site for the year. Find Out More Here >

Coca Cola

[timeflux]

Where's Coca Cola? If i remind correct, they've been the top brand of recent years, followed by McDonalds and Nokia.

Re:zeitgeist?!

[gowen]

Zeitgeist means "Spirit of the time/age" (in German). Sadly, I don't know what "cockbarrel" means, and some how I think I don't want to know, either.

BrandChannel is owned by...

[Anonymous Coward]

I work in the branding industry. I have to say, brandchannel.com is owned by Interbrand. There is a conflict of interest. Interbrand is one of the larger branding and identity firms, and they do try to be unbiased. I wouldn't say that they are just "some little website that says," but then are not an uninvolved 3rd party.

How relevant is this poll?

[windowpain]

So Interbrand asks some people who are very interested in branding what they think the top brands are. Who cares? The whole concept of a brand is to make a lasting, favorable on your customers and potential customers.

Pixar is the fifth-highest rated brand in North America? Come off it. I bet not one person in five could say who they are, let alone what they like about them. Coke, Pepsi, Levis, McDonald's, Sony, Toyota, VW all would have much higher name recognition and positive associations than Pixar not matter how good a company Pixar is (or, for example, how gross a lot of people think Mickey D's burgers are).

It always has been

[AtariAmarok]

North America is a continent that includes Central America. Central America is a region, and has never been considered to be a continent (just as Iberia is a region of Europe). See the dictionary:

"The northern continent of the Western Hemisphere, extending northward from the Colombia-Panama border and including Central America, Mexico, the islands of the Caribbean Sea, the United States, Canada, the Arctic Archipelago, and Greenland."

Always striving to correct errors of basic geography....

movie companies

[geoffspear]

I found it interesting that in the full results, Pixar came in #5 while releasing just 1 movie for the year, while Dreamworks released 4 and came in #40, while Disney managed #37.

Of course, it should be noted that these are marketing people voting. "Coca-cola" is still the 2nd most recognized word worldwide, after "okay", and it certainly belongs above #7 worldwide.

On the other hand, their brand saturation is so complete that they almost don't need to advertise anymore. I'd imagine marketing people prefer things that actually need some marketing to sell, as opposed to Coke, whose commercials serve no purpose anymore except to annoy people at movie theaters (does anyone ever see those commercials and think "oh, maybe that Coke stuff is good, I should try it sometime..."?)

Re:movie companies

[angle_slam]

Pixar only makes one type of film, which is why it is such a big deal when a Pixar movie comes out. Dreamworks, Miramax, Disney, etc. market many movies a year and without a coherent theme. In fact, with the exception of Pixar films, I can't tell you what movie studio makes most movies I watch.

Re:movie companies

[White Roses]

Last night's Simpsons had a spoof CGI movie preview "coming from DreamWorks" about "Cards." Starring Eddie Murphy, and a cameo by Jack Nicholson ("You can't handle the twos."). And, sadly, that spoof is pretty much what I expect from DreamWorks: big names and sound bites. What I expect from Pixar is excellent voice acting and engaging, multi-faceted plots. The fact that "Cards" sounds superficially like "Cars," which is Pixar's next film, and given the tragic history of DreamWorks essentially hashing the latest Pixar millieu, I found the spoof both droll and accurate.

Not a brand recognition survey

[servognome]

Looks like this was a survey of readers (I am assuming marketing type folks) as to their favorite brands, not which brands are most recognizable to people.
Coca-Cola is by far the most recognizable brand in the world. You can go to rural areas in 3rd world countries and ask for a "coca-cola" or even a "coke" and they will know what you are talking about. Ask if they have an "apple" and they will most likely think of the fruit.

Re:zeitgeist?!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Cockbarrel" is of course the English for the German "Grossenschwanstuckershaften" meaning "tool of disproportionate length and girth", also known colloquially in German as "Ein AnonymousenCowarden"

RTFA: 12.7% of the world has net access.

[KFury]

At least according to the report in question.

Re:Mixed feelings

[rdc_uk]

"All I ever hear about Al Jazeera is how they always seem to have new tapes from various terrorists..."

You might want to consider the sources from which you hear about Al-Jazeera from, before using that information to form an opinion...
Do you think the news you watch would tell you if Al-Jazeera had a report on anything else? No. Only "Al Jazeera does X that we wouldn't, aren't they bad?". Or "Al-Jazeera has X new tape, aren't they bad?"

Maybe they get the tapes from terrorists because:

• They will actually transmit them
• They transmit in the relevant languages, to audiences that speak the relevant languages
• Their offices are conveniently placed
• The tape won't go straight to the CIA.

Who the hell is Brandchannel.com?

[burnsy]

The traditional and respected ranking of global brands come from Business Week.

You can see the top 10 list for 2004 here.

1. Coke
2. Microsoft
3. IBM
4. GE
5. Intel

This popularity contest at brandchannel.com really seems to be ranking cult brands.

Re:Who the hell is Brandchannel.com?

[SIGPUNKT]

Don't know how "scientific" this one is, all the brands listed below Coke are businesses offering services or products to other businesses. I doubt your average football (pronounced "soccer") fan would recognize Intel, but they sure as hell know Marlboro. I posit that the most recognized brands are going to be those of common consumer goods, especially those that are bad for you. E.g., Marlboro, Budweiser (in N.A.), Bacardi et. al. Also McDonalds, Starbucks, and other places ordinary people are likely to visit. Biggest audience == most recognized (by definitions). As such, I don't think the brands most recognized by suits cut it.

Wrong internet penetration figure

[OlivierB]

Get your facts straight.
There are roughly 6 billion people on earth. 1% of that is "only" 60 Million.

You are way off. According to this site (http://www.internetworldstats.com/top25.htm) it is more like 12.7% of the WHOLE population.

Your point isn't void, but at least use some reasonable figures.

What about companies that 'Do No Evil?'

[applecore]

It's Google's mantra, and Apple is well-known for its happy-fun simplicity. Even /. lets us keep track of the do-gooders.

With accounting snafubars and corporate greed in other news, it's satisfying to see such 'Karma-positive' companies be so well-recognized.

Does it matter

[mb12036]

Reminded me of this article from wired not too long ago. With the value of brands declining, maybe it doesn't mean that much to have the most valued brand anymore:

http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/12.11/brands.ht ml

wtf does that mean?

[delmoi]

"greatest impact" Do they mean the first-order derivative of recognition or something? Or just their opinion.

Ikea tops Europe/Africa

[alnjmshntr]

That's weird, considering that there is not 1 IKEA store in the whole of Africa.

Re:3 out of the top 10 from US and Canada are peop

[flyingsquid]

Stephen King comes to mind as a human brand. I'm sure he could publish his grocery list and it would sell:

-1% milk, half gallon

-soup base, one pkg.

-onions, 1 lb.

-potatoes, five lb. bag

-sausage, 1 lb.

-eggs, one dozen

-pure, unspeakable evil, 1 pkg.

Re:3 out of the top 10 from US and Canada are peop

[Anonymous Coward]

Well, at least most people avoid naming their companies after their private appendage like Bill Gates did.