World's Best Brands Review 2007

The branding firm Interbrand and the BusinessWeek magazine have teamed up again to rank the world's leading super brands. For the seventh consecutive year the number one brand in the world is the brown fizzy soft drink of Coca-Cola. The global giant is slowing though as the company is spending a lot of time focusing on the healthier beverages that people are continuing to choose over the classic Coke beverage.

The Internet search engine and advertising company Google was the biggest gainer on the global brands list for 2007 with a 44 percent increase in brand value. Google is ranked 20th with a brand value of about $17.8 billion. Last year they had a brand value of $12.3 billion and were ranked 24th.

Business Week spoke with Google's vice-president of marketing David Lawee to ask him about the meteoric rise of the company. Lawee says his job is made easier by the quality of the products that Google releases; "When you have a great story to tell, you just have to tell it. Your job as a marketer is infinitely easier. We have a great story to tell." He also said "The challenge for us is to continue to outdo ourselves. That's a challenge for a lot of brands. Brands aren't static things. They're like people. They grow, they learn, they evolve. Now we're almost 10 years old. We know we have a lot to learn. But we're trying to be our own person. That's a little bit different from the way branding used to be done."

This is the 7th annual global brands list that Interbrand has put together in association with the BusinessWeek magazine. Notable winners for 2007 include the Internet giant Google with a 44% increase in brand value, the Spanish owned clothing brand Zara with 22%, Apple computers with 21%, Nintendo with 18%, and the Starbucks coffee giant with a 17% increase in value. While the biggest losers list included the American car maker Ford with a drop of 17%, Gap clothing brand dropped 15%, Kodak with 12%, Pizza Hut with 9%, and the mobile phone maker Motorola with a 9% decline in brand value.

Interbrand ranks each brand by calculating the net present value of the earnings that the brand is expected to generate. More than one third of the brand's earnings must be derived from countries other than where they are based and they must be well recognized outside of their main customer base. Their marketing and financial data must also be publicly available which excludes large privately held companies like Visa. Airlines are excluded, as are pharmaceutical brands this year, and insurance companies have been allowed this year for the first time.

When talking about the measuring of brand value, Interbrand's Group Chief Executive Jez Frampton said they have "always placed great emphasis upon the need for a balance between the logical and the creative. Brands, after all, live in our heads and our hearts. But ultimately, brands are value generators for business. Increasingly, we need to understand how brands deliver value and use this information to better inform business decisions."

In a report put out by Interbrand, they said "Leaders plan for their success by creating, managing and implementing strong strategic visions that make businesses stand out and command attention. The successful brands recognize and commit to this as a cycle of activity, prospering while they deliver economic value to the brand and their organization."

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