I was interested to see a recent article in Businessweek showing the world’s top 100 brands. No I’m not going to list all 100, you can find the full article here, but the top five are:

A number of things surprised me about this. First of all that GE (General Electric) were in the top five. Secondly the significant difference in brand value between the first four and Nokia in too surprised at most of the entries. Perhaps not surprisingly I had at least heard of all the top 100 brands. I was surprised that Ford and Kodak had both fallen over 10 places in the last year. The top UK brand is HSBC in 23rd place, and the full list contains only 6 UK owned brands. Of course just over half the brands are US owned, followed by 10 which are German owned.