Samsung Electronics has climbed one spot to No. 7 in an annual ranking of the world’s biggest brands, giving the South Korean smartphone maker a symbolic boost as it faces competitive pressures from all sides, the Wall Street Journal reports.
The top five are: Apple, Google, Coca-Cola, IBM and Microsoft.
Samsung is the highest-ranking gainer in the charts, with the top six companies holding onto their spots in the list published annually by Omnicom Group’s Interbrand consultancy.
With the gain, Samsung, which is also the top-placed company from outside the U.S., surpasses McDonald’s, which fell to No. 9, and is now within a hair of No. 6-ranked General Electric.
But even with the advance, Samsung’s brand value — estimated by Interbrand at $45.5 billion — is less than half that of smartphone rival Apple ($119 billion) or Google ($107 billion), whose Android operating system has helped Samsung secure its dominance in handset sales.
Though the amorphousness of “brand value” suggests that the list be taken with a grain of salt, Interbrand’s ranking exercise is taken very seriously at Samsung — so much so that it is enshrined as the benchmark for the company’s goal of ranking as a global top five brand in its sweeping corporate “Vision 2020″ effort, the Journal says.
In a statement trumpeting its gain on Thursday, Oct 9, Samsung noted that its brand value has more than tripled over the past decade, jumping from a ranking in the low 20s in the mid-2000s, to the top ten in 2012 — just around the time that its Samsung Galaxy series of smartphones started to emerge as a global force.
The Interbrand news comes as Samsung revamps its advertising game plan. In recent months, Samsung — which spent more than $11 billion on advertising and sales promotion last year — has been putting its global agency accounts into review, picking Publicis Groupe to handle much of its creative, digital and media accounts, according to people familiar with the matter.
Beyond the realm of marketing, Samsung has been struggling of late. On Tuesday, the company said that its third-quarter operating profit likely fell about 60% from a year earlier. Its stock sits at a two-year low, as Apple and handset makers from China squeeze Samsung’s smartphone sales.
