Sony on Top in Annual 'Best Brands' Harris Poll for Seventh Consecutive Year

[Wang]

Sony on Top in Annual 'Best Brands' Harris Poll for Seventh Consecutive Year
Wednesday July 12, 10:22 am ET

Next Three Places Taken by Dell (No. 2), Coca Cola (No. 3), and Toyota (No. 4)

ROCHESTER, N.Y., July 12 /PRNewswire/ -- Sony tops the list in the annual Harris Poll of "best brands" for an impressive seventh consecutive year. Dell retains its No. 2 spot, while Coca-Cola, previously in the fourth position, moves up to No. 3.

These are some of the results of a nationwide Harris Poll of 2,351 U.S. adults surveyed online by Harris Interactive® between June 7 and 13, 2006. Survey responses were unaided and a list of brand names was not presented to respondents. The results from this survey cannot be compared to results of the Harris Interactive 2006 EquiTrend Brand Study results, as the methodologies for the surveys differ (1).

The other places on the top-10 list of best brands are taken by Ford (No. 5), Honda (No. 6), Hewlett Packard (No. 7), General Electric (No. 8), Kraft Foods (No. 9) and Apple (No. 10). Two brands dropped out of this list this year, General Motors and Microsoft.

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.

Sony and Toyota are Japanese companies and there isn't a America economy forum so I've posted the news in this forum.
You can read the rest here.

 

[Silverpoint]

I have to say I'm surprised. Sony has taken an absolute panning in the press lately for the CD rootkit debacle, and it's ludicrously priced PS3. Plus it's completely lost out in two markets it used to dominate (the emerging flatscreen TV market to Sharp, and the portable audio market to Apple). It leaves you wondering whay still makes it the world's number one brand, when it's looking more and more like yesterday's favorite.

 

[nice gaijin]

I'm surprised too; for every step it makes, Sony shoots itself in the foot twice. Since there are no actual specifications to what parameters get a company on the list, I'm guessing they pulled a bunch of random people off the street and asked them to name a company, and the most people said "well I have a betamax player, so I'll say Sony." This sounds like the lamest consumer poll ever conducted.

And Wang, just out of curiosity, do you ever participate in discussions here, or are you just like a newsticker RSS feed?

 

[yukio_michael]

I agree with what has been said about Sony, I think that they are technically speaking one of the worst companies as far as innovation goes--- They DO innovate, but they wind up as you say, shooting themselves in the foot by way of onerous digital rights management systems, ruthlessly preventing home-innovation on the PSP, the CD rootkit debacle, the questionably priced PS3 and the inclusion of Blu Ray in order to use the platform to bolster it's user-base and rather--- create the user-base for Blu Ray...

...However, if I were to ask any of my less computer savvy friends, I'm sure they wouldn't really know anything about this. So, I'm not surprised. If you look at Sony Style, Sony's obnoxious, catalouge-magazine, you might think--- "Oh hey, the Vaio is a cute laptop... Sony is pretty cool".

 

[Silverpoint]

Their quality control has also been extremely lacking in the past few years.

The PSP screen / dead pixel fiasco is another example. To actually release a product, of which the large LCD display is one of it's key selling points, and then proceed to manufacture it with a number of defects in almost every single unit sold, is beyond belief.