TNS Asia-Pacific brand survey places Sony, Nokia, HP, ICICI on top

Market insight group TNS has released its 'Asia Pacific's Top 1000 Brands' survey for 2008, placing brands Sony, Nokia, Hewlett Packard and ICICI at the top of the "best" brand list in their own categories.

Participants in the survey were asked two questions in order to determine the best brands.

The first question was "when you think of product/service category, which is the 'best' brand that comes to your mind? The question qualified 'best' as the brand that participants trusted the most, or the brand that has the best reputation in product/service category.

In the second question, participants were asked to name the brand they considered to be the second-best brand in the product/service, apart from the brand they had just mentioned as the best.

Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Dell and SBI were ranked as the second-best brands in their respective categories. The categories were financial services, automotive, health, retail, food, beverages, alcohol and cigarettes, electronic goods, media and telecommunications, baby products, household products, toiletries and cosmetics.

The survey covered a total of 3,600 people across ten countries through interviews. First time participants in the survey included consumers from Japan, Korea and Australia, who were drawn from TNS' sixth dimension online access panels along with participants from China, Hong Kong, India, Malaysia, Singapore, Taiwan and Thailand.

Shobha Subramanian, executive director of TNS India said tat attaining and keeping the 'best brand' popularity as demonstrated by the study exemplified the success the brands had achieved in building awareness and differentiation in a challenging and competitive category. She said that this went "beyond mere market share or sales", into the realm of "consumer share of mind".