Google Pips Apple to Become the Most Valuable Brand in the World

The search-engine giant toppled Apple’s place at the top- a position it has enjoyed for the past 5 years.

The brand battle between Google and Apple has spiced up in recent times. (Photo: The Quint)

Apple might be topping the charts in the premium mobile segment, but in other areas, Google has surpassed them to become the most valuable brand in the world.

With an estimated value of $109.4 billion, Google has ended Apple’s stay at the top for five years running. While Google saw a 24% increase in its brand value, Apple on the other hand, reported a 27% decline in its brand value, from $145. 9 billion to $107.1 billion.

All these figures have been shared by the valuation consultancy, Brand Finance.

Brand value is derived from numerous factors like marketing investment, corporate reputation and staff satisfaction, among others.

Google’s monopoly in the search business has been hard to compete with, and this has minted money in the millions for them. Other than that, Google has been continuously innovating in its field, with machine learning being their latest experiment.

Google finds more innovative ways to monetise users, thereby scoring high on brand, for the first time after 2011.

Brand Finance

Apple has been caught on the wrong foot. The brand has failed to impress the critics with the iPhone in recent times, and is mostly following the footsteps of others, instead of walking on their own path of success.

Apple has been living on borrowed time for several years by exploiting its accumulated brand equity. This underlines one of the many benefits of a strong brand, but Apple has finally taken it too far.

Brand Finance

Barring the fan boys, everyone is keeping a close eye on what Apple plans to do with the 10 anniversary iPhone edition. And whether Tim Cook and Co. finally decide to foray into India in a big way.

It’s also interesting to see that Nokia, after its re-launch earlier this year, has already made to the list of the top 500 brands. With more products to be launched in 2017, we expect their fortunes to get even better.