The value of your brand might rise and fall according to the environment it's measured in. Contrasting reports from BusinessWeek and Futurelab show how.

The Business Week/Interbrand survey and ranking of the top 100 brands is well-known as a standard survey of the power of the various companies that make up its upper echelons. The rankings are compiled using a measure of the expectations of company's future earnings, according to analysts at JP Morgan Chase, Morgan Stanley and Citigroup. Here is the current top-twenty, according to that analysis.

1. Coca-Cola
2. Microsoft
3. IBM
4. GE
5. Intel
6. Nokia
7. Toyota
8. Disney
9. McDonald's
10. Mercedes-Benz
11. Citi
12. Marlboro
13. Hewlett-Packard
14. American Express
15. BMW
16. Gillette
17. Louis Vuitton
18. Cisco
19. Honda
20. Samsung

There are, of course, other ways to measure the power and value of a brand. The Futurelab 100 ranking (PDF file here) measures the online relevance of brands using a very different scale of what makes for a powerful brand, arguably according to wider and more democratic sources. The ranking is compiled using a combination of the following factors:

• the number times a brand is mentioned in Google
• the number of times a brand is mentioned in Baidu
• the number of Technorati blogposts about the brand
• the number of links to the brand’s dot-com (.com) website (URL Trends)
• the google pagerank for the brand’s dot-com (.com) website
• the relative reach of the brand’s website (as per Alexa ranking)
• the number of times the wording “I love (brand)” and “(brand) is great” appeared in Google
• the number of times the wording “I hate (brand)” and “(brand) sucks” appeared in Google (in spite of its crudeness, this word has substantial statistical significance within a US context).

Consequently, its top twenty results reveal a very different picture to BusinessWeek's.

The large differences between the two sets of rankings might be interpreted in a number of ways. The larger role of technology companies and internet properties in this ranking compared to the BusinessWeek order is perhaps predictable given that the sources of value in this poll are all online. As the Futurelab team point out in their blog post on the subject, it suggests a great disparity between what the analysts believe and how people online value brands. LG jumped thirty places up the chart in six months according to this 'citizen's choice' methodology, perhaps as a consequence of the activity surrounding the launch of its 'chocolate' phone model.

Thanks to Antony Mayfield for the spot.