Apple is the world’s most-valuable brand, Millward Brown’s 2011 BrandZ study of the most-valuable global brands now shows. Apple ended a four-year run by Google at the top of the brand ranking.
Google now is the second most-valuable global brand, followed by IBM, McDonalds, Microsoft, Coca Cola and AT&T, the top-ranked telecom brand. Vodafone ranks 12th and Verizon 13th. All those telecom firms rank ahead of Amazon.
Some will quibble with the methodology, which relies heavily on financial data, and not on more-subjective end user surveys and opinions.
But the survey also suggests that large telecom companies have important brands. Telecom executives might still chaff over the market valuations of large application providers, but the survey suggests that by some measures, few software or application providers actually have more valuable brands than the large telecom providers.
