Coca-Cola retains the No. 1 spot;
Google outpaces the pack for the second straight year
Google, Zara, Apple, and Nintendo are
among this year’s top gainers in BusinessWeek’s annual
ranking of
The
Best Global Brands 2007 For the seventh consecutive year, BusinessWeek has
teamed up with Interbrand, a leading brand consultancy,
to publish a ranking of the top 100 global brands by
brand value.
Reviving even a storied brand isn’t easy
once consumers have a negative perception of it. Just
ask Ford or Gap, which lost 19% and 15% of their brand
value, respectively, in this year’s BusinessWeek/Interbrand
annual ranking of the 100 Best Global Brands. Even such
perennial winners as Coca-Cola (No. 1) can have trouble
boosting their brand. The beverage giant claimed the top
spot for the seventh year in a row mostly because it is
big and everywhere, but it failed to further grow its
reputation because its move into healthier drinks has
yet to resonate.
Still, it’s possible to stage a brand
comeback. Several such stories emerged in this year’s
ranking.
While it’s tempting for a challenged
brand to emulate the likes of Google (No. 20), Apple
(No. 33), or Starbucks (No. 88), doing so can seem
audacious at best, delusional at worst. A potentially
more useful exercise: examining brands that have
stumbled but recovered. Take Nokia Corp. (No. 5): The
Finnish giant realized its focus on making cheap
handsets for the developing world was hurting in the US
and Europe. Nokia released high-end phones aimed at both
the consumer and business user and is showing strength
in emerging and mature markets alike.
BusinessWeek chose Interbrand’s
methodology because it evaluates brand value in the same
way any other corporate asset is valued—on the basis of
how much it is likely to earn for the company in the
future. Interbrand uses a combination of analysts’
projections, company financial documents, and its own
qualitative and quantitative analysis to arrive at a net
present value of those earnings. Interbrand takes many
ingredients into account when ranking the value of the
Best Global Brands. Even to qualify for the list, each
brand must derive at least a third of its earnings
outside its home country, be recognizable outside of its
base of customers, and have publicly available marketing
and financial data.
The Top 100
BusinessWeek Brands Feature
Lessons from Risers/Decliners (from main report below)
Best Global Brands 2007 Interbrand Report (12.7mb -big pdf file)
Interbrand says that all businesses are under immense pressure to
provide results quickly. The Best Global Brands study provides a
compelling case that those which place high importance on managing the
economic value of their intangible assets, and primarily their brands,
consistently outperform basic economic measures.
Tangible asset growth is often a slow process that requires deep and
resource-intensive long term planning. Intangible asset growth, on the
other hand, involves getting the best out of something that the company
already owns. It’s a case of managing these assets more effectively, and
it’s an efficient method of adding very real value to business.
