Last year Apple rebranded its Passbook app as Wallet and boosted Apple Pay by adding support for loyalty cards. Coca-Cola started accepting Apple Pay debit and credit cards at many of its vending machines around the same time, and now its loyalty card is catching up. Customers can add the MyCokeRewards loyalty card to Apple Pay and receive a free drink in return.
Coca-Cola could easily equip just about everyone in the country with a free Google Cardboard-style VR viewer if the above experiment turns into reality.
Apple has added 13 new retailers to its Apple Pay site, bringing the new total to 58 merchants. The biggest name wasn’t a surprise: Tim Cook gave a shout-out to Coca-Cola vending machines during Monday’s Spring Forward event, with 40,000 machines supported today, and a further 60,000 being upgraded by the end of the year …
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Apple’s gross revenues of $170B were enough for the world’s most valuable company by market cap to climb one place in the Fortune 500 ranking, from 6th to 5th place.
Apple was placed behind Walmart, Exxon, Chevron and conglomerate holding company Berkshire Hathaway (which owns large chunks of such well-known brands as Heinz, Coca-Cola, Mars and American Express). Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric and Valero Energy make up the rest of the top 10.
While Apple ranks fifth in terms of revenues, its huge cash reserves mean that it has tended to alternate with Exxon as the world’s most valuable company when measured by market capitalization, and is arguably significantly undervalued by most measures …
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http://vimeo.com/83270004
inMarket, an in-store marketing platform that recently started rolling out iBeacons to retailers, today announced an interesting new twist for the platform: the first consumer packaged goods brand to take advantage of iBeacons in a retail environment. That means that rather than the retailer controlling the entire iBeacon experience and the location-based notifications that get beamed to shoppers, inMarket’s Mobile to Mortar (M2M) platform is giving that same opportunity to the individual brands on the store’s shelves. We’ve also learned it’s about to expand and continue its rollout of iBeacons in retail locations across New York, Boston, and Miami.
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Businessweek has a fun chart showing that Apple’s iPhone business alone would make it the 9th largest stock in the Dow Jones top 30 companies, ahead of such giants as Microsoft, Coca-Cola and McDonalds.
It’s not a terribly surprising fact – the iPhone represents the bulk of Apple’s business, with its $88.4B sales greater than all of Apple’s other products and services combined ($81B), but it is quite a graphic illustration of the strength of that one product line. Apple, of course, just announced that it sold 9M iPhones in the first three days of the 5s and 5c.
Perhaps more surprising is the company that just scrapes ahead of that nominal iPhone business: IBM. While giving every impression of an out-of-date business model, the company is still making billions from large-scale IT infrastructure products, services and software. Including, I kid you not, mainframes.
While still behind Coca-Cola, which retained its No. 1 spot from last year’s report, Apple is one of Interbrand’s top risers as the No. 2 brand in its 2012 Best Global Brands Report. Apple sits just above IBM, Google, and Microsoft with a brand value of $76, 568 million—up 129 percent from last year’s study. You can see a full list of brands that made this year’s top 100 list here and a chart of Apple’s growth below:
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The Wall Street Journal today shows that the value of Apple’s brand varies greatly depending on who is taking the survey. Apple’s brand may be worth as much as $183 billion, according to an earlier Millward Brown study. The study’s results greatly vary from a separate Interbrand study, which valued the company at less than a fifth of that value and half of the value of Microsoft’s brand.
The most valuable brand in the world, according to WPP PLC’s Millward Brown, is Apple Inc., worth $183 billion—nearly a third of the company’s market capitalization of $581 billion.
Omnicom Group Inc.’s Interbrand, however, judges Apple’s brand as worth only $33.5 billion, or eighth, behind such names as MicrosoftCorp. (ranked third at $59 billion), International Business MachinesCorp. and Coca-Cola Co. (first at $71.9 billion). Interbrand notes its estimate of Apple’s brand value has risen.
Why such a big difference?
“The value of brand is both art and science,” says Allen Adamson, a managing director of Landor Associates, a branding firm owned by WPP. “It’s simple in theory but hard to pin down in reality. It’s really about how much would a consumer pay for a caramel colored soda versus how much they would pay for a Coke.”
If you think about PCs, how much would someone pay for a similarly spec’d Microsoft PC Ultrabook vs. a MacBook Air? Usually much less. The same goes for tablets—even though Apple’s prices and margins are smaller than phones or PCs. Apple’s reputation is what allows it to grab such huge margins in its hardware.
Yet, Interbrand ranks Microsoft at double of Apple’s brand. I would re-run the numbers if I were Interbrand. Millward Brown’s numbers are below:
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Apple earned the top spot in a new corporate reputation study by Harris Poll (via TechCrunch). It awarded Apple with a corporate reputation quotient of 85.63, which is enough to displace a second-ranked Google with a score of 82.82. Only eight companies earned an RQ score of 80 or above that denotes “excellent reputation.” Apple’s achievement is even more noteworthy knowing Google ranked as last year’s most reputable corporation. Facebook and Intel did not appear on the list this year at all. As for Apple’s rise:
Apple’s current dominance is built on strong investments in its brand, predominantly through its products and services. This one-dimensional approach to building reputation has ultimately yielded high associations with all six reputational dimensions. Conversely, Hewlett Packard, which once out-ranked Apple, has headed in the reverse direction. Hewlett Packard’s slowly eroding reputation has been injured by negative perceptions on Ethics and Vision & Leadership dimensions, and its brand is beginning to feel the damage.
Beverages giant Coca-Cola (No. 3), online retailer Amazon (No. 4) and multinational confectionery, food and beverage conglomerate Kraft Foods (No. 5) round out the top five. Apple ranked the highest in Financial Performance, Products & Services, Vision & Leadership and Workplace Environment—four out of the six key dimensions in reputation. Interestingly, Amazon.com rules the Emotional Appeal category, even though it lacks brick-and-mortar stores and has a limited human interaction with its customers…
