I’ve always had a keen interest in marketing, thanks to Dr. Lutz and his great marketing class at University of Florida (in fact he’s a favorite professor of BusinessWeek and featured in the article Not the Usual Drill). I’ve recently stumbled accross brandchannel.com, an independent weekly magazine for branding produced by Interbrand. They just published their online study of the top global brands in 2006, and the results are quite interesting. Here are the top 5:

1. Google
2. Apple
3. YouTube (!)
4. Wikipedia (!!!)
5. Starbucks

Surprising isn’t it? Jump to see more details and thoughts.

It’s pretty interesting to see that Web 2.0 companies/organizations made the global top 10, and not making just 1 spot, but a wopping 4! I do have a feel doubts about the results though: the sample population of the study isn’t large, and it’s really hard to believe that Wikipedia scored higher than Starbucks. Unfortunally, most people around me still do not know what Wikipedia is. However I do believe that this “opensourceness” (am I the first one to coin that word?), or the collaborative way of sharing knowledge is going to be THE top trend in 2007 and beyond. After all, YouTube went from a small internet startup to a huge household name in 18 months and was sold to Google for 1.8+ billion dollars.

Below we have the regional top 5 breakdown. One can draw some pretty interestings conclusions based on the data above. Latin America and their drinks, what’s up with that? I remember seeing a beer contest where straight Corona was voted the wost beer but Corona with lime was voted the best. Maybe lime should be #1. And HSBC in Asia, after all they do run the Hang Seng. I still have memories of growing up near Hong Kong and looking up to the HSBC skyscraper there. Europeans seem to be very big on Skype and athletic clothing. I bet it’s tough on the phone bills when majority of your friends live in 7 different countries. And lastly, with iPod sales surging 50+% year-over-year in North America, it’s hard for Apple not to reign the supereme.

Besides YouTube and Wikipedia, what else is new? I put together the below table and highlighted the companies that only appeared once within top 10 rankings over the past 6 years. As you can see, Toyota did great last year at the expense of GM and Ford losing over $5 billion a quarter. Firefox 1.0 debuted in Nov. 04, making it a huge hit in 2005 as it continues to gain traction in the broswer market. Most people aren’t familiar with Al Jazeera. It is an Arabic television network specializing in news and current affairs. And finally, I did a Google News Archive search on Samsung (1, 2), and seems like their major accomplishments in 2003 are soaring profits due to flash memory chips and taking over cellphone sales from Nokia.

Here’s another table that shows the most frequently appeared top-10 brands over the past 6 years based on the data above. I have to agree to Brandchannel.com’s conclusion “Bow to Your Google”. I always wonder about this nowaday: how did we live w/o Google 10 years ago?

Here’s more for the information-hungry:

Giant list of rankings since 2001

Charts of votes per brand per region per year

Brandchannel.com’s analysis of top 5 per region

Reuters: YouTube, Wikipedia storm to top brand ranking

Top photo courtesy of Flickr