After bumper sales of the new iPad 2, Apple has been awarded another accolade as it has been revealed that their consumer brand has hit the top spot with its consumer goodwill now being valued at a staggering $153.3 billion.
The BrandZ Top100 rankings, compiled by advertising specialist WPP’s subsidiary Millward Brown, claims that Apple’s work in the consumer space over the last five years has led to an increase in ‘brand value’ of 859 per cent – making it the most valuable brand in the world.
This now means that it is above heavy weights like BMW, HSBC, Coca Cola and Disney. We bet Steve Jobs had quite a spring in his step this morning, say what you will about Apple but this is quite some achievement from a company 15 years ago that was on the verge of going out of business.
The tech sector had a very strong year as a whole, with Facebook’s brand improving in value by a staggering 246 percent (to $19.1b) and Amazon becoming the world’s most valuable retailer (at $37.6b) in spite of having no actual stores.
Sadly, there were some downers too, as Nintendo lost 37 percent of its brand worth over the past year, Nokia dropped by 28 percent, and the BlackBerry marque was considered 20 percent less awesome than before.
New versions of the iPhone and iMac, and the introduction of the iPad tablet, helped Cupertino, California-based Apple almost double sales and profit for the latest quarter. Apple, which overtook Redmond, Washington-based Microsoft Corp, as the most-valuable technology company by market value in May 2010, boosted its share of the global phone market and is the leading seller of tablet computers.
The full top 100 rankings, complete with year-on-year comparisons for each brand, can be downloaded from Millward Brown for free as a PDF file.
One thought on “Apple’s Brand Tops The Rich List”
More companies could learn from the customer service model that Apple has in place – quibble free help at the genius bar in store and a free-issue replacement iphone within 5 minutes – lesser marques would have insisted that my 5 month old phone be sent away to have the intermittent microphone fault repaired. They have my attention for all related products from this point on – if they sell it, I will be buying from them!