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The World Most Valuable Brand

The world’s most valuable brands. Who’s most engaged?

ENGAGEMENTdb
Ranking the Top 100 Global Brands

Prepared by:

www.ENGAGEMENTdb.com

July 2009

TABLE OF CONTENTS
Introduction ......................................................................................... 1

INTRODUCTION
Historically, economic hardship motivates companies to take a good, hard look at their marketing budgets and try to compute each investment’s financial value. This recession is no different, with one exception: social media has become perceived as an indispensible marketing tool — one getting increased investment — despite a historical inability to quantify its worth. There is little left to debate about whether or not one should participate in social media — virtually all companies, big and small, have acknowledged social media’s presence, and firms who do not have a blog, Facebook page, or Twitter account now find themselves in the scarce minority. Many, however, appear to be blindly hopping on the bandwagon — people are creating company profile pages and sending updates without knowing how much they should invest in these distribution channels or what success even looks like. This brings us back to Economics 101: how can a company effectively allocate limited marketing resources if they cannot define the investment’s value? For the first time ever, Wetpaint/Altimeter Group have gone beyond surface case studies to measure the true financial value of social media. We conducted our research not just on a small scale, but based on the world’s 100 most valuable brands – these are brands that are widely acknowledged for setting the standards in marketing as measured by BusinessWeek / Interbrand “Best Global Brands 2008” rankings. And now, we evaluate how well they are engaging their consumers using social media and, even more importantly, how that engagement correlates with their most important financial metrics: revenue and profit. A surprising conclusion: While much has been...