Amazon overtakes Google as most respected brand in UK

Amazon.co.uk is the brand that UK consumers respect the most, according to the Marketing Week/BrandIndex Best Brand Performers 2008 survey. The online retailer pushed Google, last year’s winner, into second place, with the BBC coming third and Freeview in fourth place.

Amazon scored a total of 60 points, compared with Google’s 57 and the BBC’s 52. The other brands in the top ten were Marks & Spencer, Cadbury, Nokia, Heinz, Boots and Kellogg respectively.

The rankings are based on the average BrandIndex scores over the fourth quarter of 2007. BrandIndex, the brand tracking service launched in 2005 by the polling company YouGov, measures more than 1,000 brands across seven criteria – Buzz, General Impression, Quality, Value, Corporate Reputation, Customer Satisfaction and Recommend (whether respond- ents would recommend the brand to a friend).

Every weekday, YouGov interviews more than 2,000 people from its online panel of more than 200,000. For the Best Brand Performers 2008 survey, the BrandIndex score was calculated by averaging six of the seven criteria over the fourth quarter of 2007.

YouGov does not include the Buzz rating because it is the result of things that happen to brands rather than the cause of them. YouGov points out that although Amazon scored best over the last quarter of 2007, the BBC would have taken pole position had the results been based on the first quarter of 2008.