One way to differentiate your business is through branding although different people think branding means different things.
There’s an irony there since branding is meant to clarify the position of what a product stands for.
The Centre Of Brand Analysis has come up with its list of Superbrands 2011 and it contains some surprises.
There are two lists – for consumer brands and for business brands.
Consumer Superbrands 2011: Official Results
1. Mercedes-Benz
2. Rolex
3. BBC
4. Coca-Cola
5. Google
6. Microsoft
7. BMW
8. British Airways
9. Apple
10. Jaguar
Business Superbrands 2011: Official Results
1. Rolls-Royce Group
2. BlackBerry
3. Microsoft
4. Google
5. Apple
6. London Stock Exchange
7. PricewaterhouseCoopers
8. GlaxoSmithKline
9. Visa
10. Bosch
Personally I think the lists are pretty surprising but if you want to dig deeper, there are lists of top 500 brands for consumers and business.
The process that created the list is based on three stages
- Brand researchers create a list of brands
- Brand experts score the brands and eliminate the bottom 40%
- The brands are voted on by a YouGov panel of more than 2,000 British consumers which is intended to be representative of the general population.
The main focus is on three issues:
- Does the brand represent quality products and services?
- Can the brand be trusted to deliver consistently?
- Is the brand well known and differentiated from its competitors?
Do you agree with the list?
Are Mercedes, Rolex and the BBC worthy of the top 3 positions in the consumer list?
I don’t think so.
It’s been a few years since I last looked at Mercedes as a car to buy but what I found was that they looked nice, the dealership service was very good but when I checked on the reliability and post purchase customer satisfaction, i was shocked at how bad it was.
Perhaps things have improved a lot. They certainly needed to.
I admire Rolex for its ability to get consumers to pay way over the odds for something that has similar functionality to a watch that costs a few pounds. I’ve never owned one but again, I’ve heard some bad things about time keeping.
And the BBC?
Sorry but I think the BBC is a tarnished organisation which shows little of its famous objectivity. I am getting increasingly irritated with the biased reporting of the public spending cuts without any reference to the need to reign in the annual deficit to even slow down the rate of increase in the national debt.
Updated in October 2011
I’ve decided against writing a new blog each time I see a list of top brands but i will update this list.
Interbrand have recently published the best global brands list for 2011.
Top of the pile is Coca-Cola for the twelfth year in a row. No arguments there, but I was surprised by some other names in the top 10:
2 IBM
3 Microsoft
4 Google
5 General Electric
6 McDonald’s
7 Intel
8 Apple
9 Disney
10 Hewlett Packard
The first surprise is the dominance of technology brands. The first car company for example was Toyota at 11th.
IBM at 2 was a big surprise. I’ve little idea what the brand stands for these days and it seems to have fallen along way in my eyes from the days of “nobody got fired for buying an IBM”.
General Electric at 5 was also a surprise although this brand may carry far more weight in the USA. Hewlett Packard at 10 also surprised me.
Now I’m in the “branding is positioning in the mind” school so multi-category brands don’t fit that well with me.
Even Apple. I struggle with the idea of “what’s an Apple?”
Apart from a tasty fruit, is it a computer, a telephone, a music playing device?
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