Brand Finance has recently published Brand Finance 500: the annual report on the world's most valuable brands. The full report is 36 pages in length, introducing its publisher, giving mini brand-biographies of the top 10 brands and, before listing its "league table", discussing some of the methodological issues encountered in this exercise. This year's report is twice as ambitious as last year's, which tackled only the top 250 brands.As usual, Coca-Cola tops the chart. What is interesting is that the three brands in closest pursuit have all been tainted by a fair degree of opprobrium in the past year -- whether from consumers or from competition authorities: Microsoft, Google and Wal-mart. How precisely this can be factored into a complex calculation alongside the more easily quantifiable criteria remains a matter for debate.
