Coca Cola, the 69 billion dollar brand
Not a single Australian brand features in a listing of the 100 best global brands compiled by Interbrand.
According to the branding company, Coca Cola is the most valuable brand in the world, with a worth of more than US$68bn. Next comes IBM, whose brand is worth $60bn, says Interbrand, and Microsoft, worth $57bn.
In the top five global brands, Interbrand’s list has not changed at all compared to a year before.
McDonald’s has climbed two places to sixth and now has a brand worth $32bn, while the value of Google’s brand has leaped by 25% to $32bn, says Interbrand.
What do IBM do again?
According to research from IBM late last year, Vegemite is actually the world’s most loved brand on the internet. So there’s something positive for Aussie brands!
The Aussie spread actually came in ahead of global mega brands Coca-Cola, Nike and Starbucks, when it came to worldwide online users searching brand names and commenting on brand appeal.
The research analysed 1.5 billion posts across 38 languages within social networking sites, blogs, message boards, and online news. The results discovered 479,206 mentions for Vegemite, with brand affinity found more often than any other product globally.
And more good news: according to this year’s ‘Australian Best Brands’ report from Interbrand, many Aussie brands are poised for further growth.
While there are no Australian brands that appear on the prestigious ‘Best Global Brands list’ this year, (to qualify for the global table, at least one-third of earnings needs to be earned from outside the company’s home base), our brands are aggressively seeking to expand away from their homeland and into larger and more lucrative overseas markets.
Brands such as Billabong, Macquarie Group, Ansell, Computershare and Flight Centre have already established cash flows in other markets around the world.
Furthermore, in 2006, Australia was named the world’s most marketable country brand, according to the Country Brand Index. It came ahead of the US (in second place) and Italy (third) and we’ve stayed in the top spot for the past three years.
So appearing in the BGB list isn’t too far around the corner for some Aussie brands, I think.