BrandsZ Top 100 Names BMW Most Valuable Auto Brand

31st July 2010

BMW has risen to the top of the Millward Brown BrandsZ Top 100 survey, making BMW the most valuable automobile brand on earth, reports AutoNews.com. Toyota Motor Corp. had been the leader the year before in the annual poll, but their recall troubles and travails in Congress knocked them back to the number two spot among automakers (26th overall). Some including Millward Brown Global Brand Manager Peter Walshe believe that this is only a temporary setback for Toyota. BMW moved into the top slot despite a nine percent decrease from the previous year. Toyota’s problems were significant, however, as they dropped 27 percent.

BMW is king, but Ford is gaining fast

Ford (19 percent) and Volkswagen (20 percent) both experienced a tremendous increase in brand value on the BrandsZ Top 100. Walshe said that Ford’s exciting new technology – from voice control to better emissions standards and exciting social media – played a large role in their surprising success on the survey. Volkswagen and Audi (2 percent increase) are “viewed as trustworthy brands with style, global distribution, German engineering and lower prices than prestige,” according to a Millward Brown press release.

Toyota has company on the way down

Luxury automotive brands like Mercedes-Benz (11 percent) and Porsche (31 percent) also took significant brand value hits, which is part of why the combined value of the six automakers that made BrandsZ Top 100 is down 15 percent overall. The 15 percent drop is the largest in any sector on the survey, thanks to bailouts and recalls.

The top 10 most valuable auto brands in the world

A measure of consumer opinion and corporate performance, the Millward Brown’s BrandsZ Top 100 survey is based heavily upon international consumer reviews and financials kept by Bloomberg and Datamonitor. Google, IBM and Apple sit atop the prestigious survey, with brand values ranging from $ 114 billion to $ 83 billion. Here are the top 10 most valuable auto brands on the list (value in billions of dollars; top 100 rank in parenthesis):