BizAims

According to the report presented by Interbrand, a brand consultancy company, the image of Coca-Cola Co. was overall the most valuable for eight years in a row. It is worth mentioning that the consultancy company ranked different brands according to the revenue of each company.

The number one search engine, Google, was the one to register the most impressive increase in value. This is mainly because the company introduced some of its news features, including Google Mobile, Google Docs & Spreadsheets and Google Book Search. According to Interbrand, Google's new features allowed the company to increase its value by $25.59 billion.

Millward Brown Optimor, branding and research firm based in United Kingdom, picked Google as the best brand for the second year in a row. It ranked the drinks giant fourth. When identifying the value of the brand, the two companies factor in a company's performance.

In the ratings offered by Interbrand, the brands of Ford Motor Co., Citigroup Inc., Morgan Stanley, Gap Inc. and Merrill Lynch had registered the biggest fall. Before Bank of American acquired Merrill Lynch, the latter registered huge losses in credit crisis. The value of the company's brand fell by $11.4 billion.

In her report, Nancy Koehn, a professor at Harvard Business School, wrote that in today's economic weakness a valued brand has to discount less in case its customers are looking forward to spend more if they believe in the value it provides for their dollar.

A lot of chief executives simply fail to notice the significance of brands during the periods of uncertain economy. Quite often they cut investments in brands hopping to slash costs. According to Koehn, such practice is shortsighted.

After performing its survey in July this year, in which over half of the markets participated, the American Marketing Association came to a conclusion that investing in a brand could be helpful for a company in case it has to deal with the problem of recession.

In its rankings Intrebrand included a number of factors, and namely: the revenue of a certain brand, estimated according to the reports of different analysts and company information; the influence of the brand on the company's customers according to the market research; and how the brand is able to maintain future revenue, determined by the brand's market position and image.

The second brand after Coca-Cola was IBM, the value of which increased by $59.01 billion due to the fact that the company decided to shift from PC maker to the seller of PC solution. It is worth mentioning that because Lenovo is taking out the IBM brand from its ThinkPads earlier than it was planned, IBM will distance itself even more from the PC business.

The software giant Microsoft, had its brand positioned third, even though the company had a rough year because its new operating system, Windows Vista, registered low sales. It was a difficult year also due to the fact that the company failed to take over Yahoo! and the image of Bill Gates decreased.

Apple has increased the value of its brand by $13.72 billion. This is mainly because the company has launched its new iPods, iPhones and its new laptop MacBookAir. In addition, Apple increased the value of its brand thanks to in-store service at its "genius bars". Amazon registered a $6.43 billion increase as the company carries on with its transition from selling books to becoming a super-mall. In Interbrand's rankings the company ranked 58^th.