Google Now the World's Second-Most Valuable Brand. Guess Who's First?

Google’s four year run as the world’s most powerful brand came to an end today, its supremacy cut short by the ascension of another tech juggernaut: Apple.

According to Millward Brown’s 2011 BrandZ study of the most-valuable global brands, Apple’s brand in 2011 is worth about $153 billion. That’s 84 percent more than it was worth last year and a fair bit more than Google’s brand as well. A 2 percent decline dropped the company’s brand value to $111 billion and its BrandZ ranking to No. 2.

This, despite the popularity of its search service and Android operating system.

So how is it that Apple managed to unseat Google from the top spot it had enjoyed for so long? Evidently, there’s a one-word answer for that question: iPad.

“It is really the iPad that has driven Apple’s growing brand value although the iPhone has continued to do magnificently too,” global BrandZ director at Millward Brown Peter Walshe told The Guardian.

Incidentally, Apple wasn’t the only tech company to see a big spike in brand value in 2011. Facebook did as well. The value of its brand grew 246 percent to an estimated $19.1 billion. That’s only enough to give it the No. 35 slot on the top 100 brand list and the No. 10 spot on the top tech brands list, but such meteoric growth says a lot about consumer perceptions of the company, which are obviously riding high despite privacy concerns and continuing questions about its origin story.

“Perhaps the most important trend we’ve seen over the last few months is the rise of Facebook,” said TNS Global’s Stephen Yap. “Transcending its roots as just a social network, a place where people send messages to and from their contact list, to become very much an aggregator of all kinds of communication and entertainment activities that people do on their computers and mobile devices. Whether it’s playing games, sharing photos, videos or chatting, Facebook is increasingly becoming the dominant platform for all kinds of technology activities for consumers across the world.”