
Claim: The three most valuable brand names on Earth are Marlboro, Coca Cola, and Budweiser, in that order.
OUTDATED
Example: [Collected via e-mail, August 2001]
I saw this statement in an e-mail. Is this true?
"The 3 most valuable brand names on earth: Marlboro, Coca-Cola, and Budweiser, in that order."
Origins: The value of a recognized brand name is both difficult to estimate and difficult to overestimate. Certainly companies with long established, widely recognized brand names don't overestimate their value, spending millions of dollars in advertising every year not to directly promote sales of specific products but simply to keep their brand names in front of the public. So of all the millions of brands in the world, which ones are at the top of the heap? Which companies have been the most successful at constantly nurturing their brands to keep pace in a rapidly changing world?
A long-circulated bit of Internet trivia attempts to surprise readers by informing them that the "three most valuable brand names on Earth"
are ones they wouldn't necessarily peg for the very highest spots, namely Marlboro,
Assigning comparative values to brand names is a process that involves a number of subjective elements, so brand rankings vary depending upon who is doing the ranking and what criteria they use. One of the most prominent organizations in this field is Interbrand, a global branding consultancy that (among their other business activities) assigns values to brand names and publishes an annual list of brand name rankings, subject to some qualifications:
These requirements — that a brand be global, visible, and relatively transparent in financial results — lead to the exclusion of some well-known brands that might otherwise be expected to appear in the ranking. The Mars and BBC brands, for example, are privately held and do not have publicly available financial data. Walmart, although it does business in international markets, often does so under a variety of brands and, therefore, does not meet Interbrand's global requirements.
There are several criteria for inclusion in Interbrand's annual Best Global Brands report. The brand must be truly global and needs to have successfully transcended geographic and cultural boundaries. It must have expanded across the established economic centers of the world, and be establishing a presence in the major markets of the future. In measurable terms, this requires that:
Interbrand's 2013 ranking of the Best Global Brands finds that things have changed considerably since the days when
Millward Brown's BrandZ 2013 list of the "Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands," which is more inclusive than Interbrand's and is based on a database of feedback from millions of consumers and professionals, shows the
A comparison of the two organizations' most recent rankings shows a good deal of similarity in the top seven spots:
Interbrand (2013) | Brandz (2013) |
#1 Apple | #1 Apple |
#2 Google | #2 Google |
#3 Coca-Cola | #3 IBM |
#4 IBM | #4 McDonald's |
#5 Microsoft | #5 Coca-Cola |
#6 General Electric | #6 AT&T |
#7 McDonald's | #7 Microsoft |
But Mark Ritson, writing for MarketingWeek, noted that the different approaches employed by Interbrand and BrandZ can also produce some quite disparate results:
The problem for the two companies involved, and marketers in general, is how far apart their annual estimates of brand value tend to be. For example, in 2010 BrandZ estimated the value of the Google brand to be In contrast, Interbrand valued Google’s brand at The vast $70 billion difference is not derived from a difference of
The two most well-regarded brand valuations are provided by Millward Brown's BrandZ
Additional information:
![]() | Best Global Brands (2013) (Interbrand) |
![]() | Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands (2013) (BrandZ) |
Last updated: 18 October 2013