bizologie has covered the top social media brands, but which brands have the most value overall? Millward Brown Optimor, with The Financial Times, Bloomberg and Datamonitor, developed the BrandZ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands. The BrandZ Top 100 fuses consumer measures of brand equity with financial measures to give each brand a dollar value, so the brands with more loyal customers have higher values. As Advertising Age reported, for the first time in 4 years the Google brand has been knocked from the top. Can you guess who finally toppled the king of brands? Yep, Apple. With their sales of ipads they moved to the top spot. This year Amazon just beat Walmart as the most-valuable retail brand with its brand rising to $37.6 billion as Wal-Mart's fell to $37.3 billion. Wal-Mart still has more than 10 times the sales and more than five times the market capitalization of Amazon, but BrandZ's calculation subtracts tangible assets from market value, so Amazon benefits because they have no physical stores. The largest increase in growth was Facebook up 246% (now worth $19.1 billion). The Chinese search engine Baidu saw the second largest growth with a jump of 141%. Even with their tough year, Toyota's brand still rose 11%.
You can get a full copy of the 2010 report for free from BrandZ. Here's a look at the top 10 for 2011:
