Rating the world's most powerful brands
Posted
Apr 22 2008, 07:43 AM
by
Douglas McIntyre
Rating:
Once a year, the firm Millard Brown puts out its BrandZ 100 Most Valuable Brands. The data used for the list come from consumer research and financial data on the companies. The research house gives its methodology here.
For those who think Google is the top brand, give yourself a pat on the back. It has a brand valuation of $86 billion, up 30%. For those research mavens in the crowd, the figure makes absolutely no sense. Google has a market cap of $168 billion. Most of that would go away -- no matter how good the technology is -- if it changed it name to Dawdle.
Apple is up high on the list, at No. 7 with a brand valuation of $55 billion, up 30% over last year. The number may not be right, but with improved Mac sales and the iPhone intro the increase rings true.
IBM clocks in at $55 billion, up 65%. No one can argue that the company has not had a good year.
Cisco did well at $24 billion, up 28%. Oracle had a brand value of $23 billion, up 29%.
Citgroup lost a lot of ground, down 10% to $30 billion. At this point, Citi would be better off changing its name, so the figure may be a little heavy, by about $30 billion.
Of all the brands on the list, the one with the largest increase in value was Blackberry, up 390% to almost $14 billion.
There weren't a lot of surprises among the losers. Starbucks dropped 25% to $12 billion. The entire market cap of the company is $13 billion. All that extra coffee and real estate must not be worth very much.
Yahoo's brand value dropped 13% to $11.5 billion. A lot of analysts think that if Yahoo's investment in other companies went away, the core portal business would only be worth about $15 billion.
Ebay dropped 13% to just over $11 billion. Ford was also down 13% to $11 billion. With a market cap of $17 billion, that does leave much for the rest of the car company's assets.
Finally, Motorola fell 30% to $7.5 billion. That number should probably be zero
