Each year a ranking of the “The Best Global Brands” is compiled which immediately affects the value of a company. This year, however, this correlation also had the opposite effect: the financial crisis was detrimental to some brands, e.g. Merrill Lynch. The three top ranks once more went to Coca Cola, IBM and Microsoft. The three most important German brands are Mercedes Benz (rank 11, 2007: rank 10), BMW (rank 13, 2007: rank 13) and SAP (rank 31, 2007: rank 34).
Coca-Cola has been at the top for eight years in a row now while IBM could replace Microsoft as runner-up. Google made a jump forward from rank 20 to 10. Doing so it drove out Mercedes Benz from the top ten which was the only German representative in this group.
Among interesting newcomers in this ranking are H&M (rank 22), Thomson Reuters (44), BlackBerry (73), Giorgio Armani (94), Marriott (96), FedEx (99) and Visa (100).
Given that there has recently been a boom on markets for luxury products companies such as Porsche (75), Ferrari (93) and Prada (91) did correspondingly well.
Whoever wants to be included in this ranking has to generate at least one third of their turnover outside their country of origin, be relatively widely known and present generally accessible financial and marketing data. The rating of brands is made on the basis of estimates as to how much this brand name is going to earn a company in future. Interbrand, who are a brand name specialist, publish the above ranking once each year. For evaluating brands they use predictions by analysts as well as financial documents of a company and their own analyses.
The whole ranking of the 100 “Best Global Brands” is available on the internet. 