Interbrand Zyntzmeyer & Lux AG agency together with weekly newspaper Business Week Russia published the yearly rating of 40 the most expensive Russian Brands. Brand’s value was determined the following way: firstly, specialists computed the profit share a company made owing to the brand, secondly, brand’s contribution to intangibles of a company and its force and risks were specified. The first place was taken by Beeline brand (Vympelkom): its cost in 2006 made up 156.2bn rubles. Second and third places were secured consequently by MTS - Mobile TeleSystems (136.46bn rubles) and Baltica – beer brand (51.62bn rubles).

Among the top ten brands there are a lot of companies working in the natural resources sector. Thus, Lukoil, Slavneft, Rosneft, Tatneft and SeverStal are on the list. The file closers are Domik v Derevne – dairy products (10.89bn rubles) and Megafon – cellular operator (10.57bn rubles).

The value of Beeline’s brand is comparable to that of Gucci – $5.10bn, Wrigley’s – $5.06bn, Phillips - $4.46bn. World’s top three positions are occupied by Coca-Cola - $70.45bn, Microsoft - $65.17bn, IBM - $51.77bn. The most valuable Russian brands 2006 – are 40 brands priced at over 867bn rubles each, which were selected according to the following criteria: branded products/services must be produced in Russia and for Russia no matter who owns a company or a brand. Some widely known folk crafts, Gzhel for example, are out of rating as it’s impossible to identify their owner. Only the brands sold everywhere in Russia were represented on the list. Those companies, which stock belongs to the state (50% and more), got low index of the brand role in order to offset the state bias.

Brands’ value was calculated on basis of financial and marketing information open to public. The discounted brand value shows the current cost of forward earnings received from brand work. Interbrand Ltd. evaluates brands by means of its own method acknowledged by leading audit companies of the world.

Meanwhile, hyper-popularity of a brand may be dangerous for it or even lead to its ruin. Any company aims at making its brand so popular and recognizable as possible. The more consumers are familiar with the brand, the higher its value is and the more expensive the company’s assets are. It may seem, that marketing specialists set the ultimate target of throwing all their business rivals into the shade and making their own brand well known. Sometimes they can overleap themselves: the brand comes to the very top of popularity, where death is waiting for him. The brand turns into the common name for the whole group of similar products and is no longer protected by the patent legislation.

Consumers call copy machines – xerox, diapers – pampers, etc., at the same time all money invested into promotion of these brands may be considered as wasted. That is what happened to Google. This Web portal processes over 60% of all retrieval operations conducted on Internet and for quite a long time already users call such activity googling, which suits everybody, except for one of the owners of the company Sergey Brin. Within the last year his brand rose in price 46%. Interbrand evaluates its cost at $12.38 bn. Not wishing to lose money Sergey intends to be at law with Merriam-Webster and apply to Mass Media (primarily) asking not to “google”. However, it is possible to come to an agreement with Mass Media, but common “googler” or “photoshoper” will hardly keep silent.

Sources:

    www.point.ru
    www.tatar-inform.ru

Olga Pletneva