Apple. The brand is worth $153 billion and this year tops uber brandname Google, according to a new survey. The Mountain View, Calif. company, which topped the list in 2010, slipped to second place to $111 billion.
“Apple earned an 84 percent increase in brand value with successful iterations of existing products like the iPhone, creation of the tablet category with iPad, and anticipation of a broadened strategy making the brand a trifecta of cloud computing, software, and innovative, well-designed devices,” announced Branz, a subsidiary of advertising giant WPP.
The Cupertino, Calif. tech giant beat out such well-known brands as Coca-Cola ($78 billion), Disney ($17.2 billion) and Microsoft ($78 billion). Other technology powerhouses also ranked below Apple. PC manufacturing leader HP listed in No. 18. PC maker Dell dropped from the list while embattled cell-phone giant Nokia lost 28 percent of it’s brand value.
The survey also predicts a much-rumored “cloud” computing tactic would create a “trinity of platform, content and device,” further increasing the company’s brand value.
Although Apple made the fifth-largest gain since 2010, jumping 84 percent in this year’s Branz survey, social-networking phenom Facebook’s brand value recorded an explosive 246 percent increase to $19 billion.
Ed Sutherland is a veteran technology journalist who first heard of Apple when they grew on trees, Yahoo was run out of a Stanford dorm and Google was an unknown upstart. Since then, Sutherland has covered the whole technology landscape, concentrating on tracking the trends and figuring out the finances of large (and small) technology companies.
