Millward Brown, a research agency focused on effective advertising, marketing communications, media and brand equity research, has just released the fifth annual Millward Brown Optimor BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands.
The BrandZ Top 100 is distinguished as the only worldwide brand appraisal that takes into account customers' opinions on brands and then demonstrates them with a dollar value. Said value is derived from each brand's ability to generate demand coupled with a future earnings forecast and then discounted to a present-day dollar figure.
Noting that while most key financial indicators plummeted last year, the value of the top 100 brands rose by four per cent to more than US$2 trillion, which is also marked a forty per cent growth over five years.
Unsurprisingly, technology brands demonstrated their dominance with a six per cent overall brand growth, bested only by the 12 per cent brand growth of financial institutions, and a 10 per cent brand growth in the recession-friendly sector that is beer.
But overall, tech ruled the top 10, with Google leading as the "Most Valuable Global Brand" worth US$114 billion. IBM was second and up 30 per cent to $86 billion; Apple's brand value grew by 32 per cent to place third at $83 billion; Microsoft ranked fourth at $76 billion.
Rounding out the top 10 were Coca Cola ($68 billion), McDonald's ($66 billion), Marlboro ($57 billion), China Mobile ($53 billion), GE ($45 billion) and Vodaphone ($44 billion).
Other technology brands also fair well despite (or because of) the global recession; social networking site Facebook ranked for the first time with brand value assessed at $5.5 billion.
Video game consoles also continued to place as pervasive worldwide brands, with Nintendo devices leading the pack starting with Wii at $10 billion and the portable DS at nearly $8 billion. Rounding out the top five console brands were Microsoft's Xbox 360 ($4.5 billion) and Sony's struggling PlayStation3 ($0.43 billion) and PlayStation Portable (PSP) ($0.15 billion).
Mobile phone operators took a small collective hit last year, with an overall brand value drop of just one per cent, thanks to a couple of key upticks within the category. Verizon Wireless saw a huge surge in brand recognition, up 39 per cent to a value of $26 billion, edging out AT&T at $24 billion with 18 per cent growth.
Noting that strong brands tend to be resilient in a recession, the BrandZ Top 100 showed Samsung to be the bounciest of the rebounders with an 80 per cent increase in brand recognition, valued at $11 billion.
In other, non-technology categories, the usual best-in-class suspects included Walmart ($39 billion), BMW ($22 billion), Gillette ($21 billion), BP ($17 billion), Nike ($13 billion), State Farm ($8 billion), Nescafe ($5 billion), and Smirnoff ($5 billion).
"In the past, many companies were quick to cut their marketing spend during a down economy," said Joanna Seddon, CEO of Millward Brown Optimor. "A new trend has emerged in the wake of the recession as more companies realized the importance of maintaining and even increasing budgets to support brand loyalty and engagement."
Consumers, meanwhile, should continue take pride in their collective loyalty to Wii and Smirnoff.
The complete BrandZ Top 100 reports and analysis is available at millwardbrown.com/brandz.
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