Viewpoint: Mark Ritson
- Click here to read this week’s cover story, a full analysis of the BrandZ top 100 most valuable brands
- How can a 160-year-old financial service come accross as modern and flexible? Click here to find out how Amercan Express did it
- eBay vice-president of marketing for Europe tells us how they differenciate themselves from other e-tailers, click here to read
Viewpoint
: Mark Ritson, Marketing Week columnist and associate professor of marketing
BrandZ is one of the three well-known rankings of brand strength. Here is your two-minute Ritson guide to the ’big three’.
Interbrand – the heritage brand
Top Brand: Coca-Cola (2010)
Due out in August, Interbrand can rightly claim the honours as the founding firm of brand valuation and one of the first true brand consulting firms. Its Top 100 is based on the opinion of experts across Interbrand’s global offices. They rank all the brands on 10 variables that Interbrand deems essential to brand health and the results feed the subsequent valuations.
BrandZ – the superior product
Top Brand: Apple
The reason BrandZ can claim superiority over all-comers is the fact that its top 100 is based on enormous amounts of data. Unlike other valuations that put very gross estimates on brand strength, BrandZ interviews more than 1.5 million people in 31 countries about 50,000 brands. In the game of marketing, good data wins every time and the sheer scale of data that goes into BrandZ makes it, in my opinion, the best of the bunch.
Superbrands – close, but no cigar
Top Brand: Mercedes Benz (UK)
Built from a method that defies logic, Superbrands continues to get its results covered across the British media. Only Superbrands can claim (as it did in its 2011 list) that Wedgwood is twice as strong a brand as WH Smith and that Encyclopaedia Britannica is a bigger brand than Audi, Adidas and Sony. Madness.
