| Sony today found itself on top of the Harris Poll of "best brands" for an impressive seventh consecutive year with leading PC vendor Dell taking the No. 2 spot, traditionally strong Coca-Cola brand moving up from No. 4 last year to No.3, and Apple--making the top 10 for the first time--ranked No. 10 in this year's list. While Apple's breakthrough appearance in the top 10 shows its (relative) growing strength, Microsoft and General Motors dropped out of the top 10 (and Google was notably absent). The tally is the result of a nationwide Harris Poll of 2,351 U.S. adults surveyed online by Harris Interactive conducted from June 7-13th in which Harris said that survey responses were unaided and a list of brand names was not presented to respondents. The results differ remarkably from BrandChannel.com unweighted fifth annual online survey of over 2500 readers in which Google regained its title as the most popular global brand in 2005, while Apple was named the top brand in the US. Both Google and Apple were also atop a recently released consumer loyalty survey. Other places on the Harris top-10 list of best brands are: Toyota (No. 4), Ford (No. 5), Honda (No. 6), Hewlett Packard (No. 7), General Electric (No. 8), and Kraft Foods (No. 9, falling from No. 3 last year).
Other brands that receive a substantial number of mentions but not enough to make the top-10 list include Chevrolet, Panasonic, Pepsi Cola, Nike and Maytag, according to the company. Half of the top-10 brands are for electronics products; three are for automobile and two for consumer and packaged goods.
This Harris Poll was conducted online with figures for age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, region and household income weighted where necessary to bring them into line with their actual proportions in the population. Propensity score weighting was also used to adjust for respondents' propensity to be online, according to the company.
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