DUBAI — The latest YouGov BrandIndex rankings reveal that Emirates, Al Baik and Google are the most popular brands in the Middle East. While Emirates tops YouGov BrandIndex’s annual brand health rankings for the UAE for the third year in succession, Al Baik and Google dethrone Almarai and Facebook to top the rankings for Saudi Arabia and Egypt, respectively.

The rankings are based on the Index score from YouGov BrandIndex, which measures overall brand health. The score takes into account consumers’ perception of a brand’s overall quality, value, impression, reputation, satisfaction and whether consumers would recommend the brand to others.

Technology giants WhatsApp and YouTube make an appearance in all three countries. In both UAE and Egypt, WhatsApp has made an improvement. Although in Egypt YouTube has improved its brand health, in the UAE, it has seen a decline in its rank. In Saudi Arabia, both these brands remain in the same spot as last year.

Apple seems to have had a tough year in the region. In Saudi and the UAE, Apple has seen a decline in its rank by one and two places, respectively. Furthermore, in Egypt, Apple’s smartphone brand- iPhone has slipped down three places to ninth this year.

In the UAE, Carrefour has made a great improvement to its brand perception and has jumped ahead six places to become the fourth most popular brand in the country. One of the most interesting movements in the Saudi top 10 rankings is the large strides made by mada over the past year. On top of becoming one of the top 10 brands in the country, the payment network tops YouGov’s most improved brand health list for KSA – increasing its scores by +9.0 over the last 12 months.

Netflix is the most improved brand of 2019 in the UAE, with a change in score of +9.8 and restaurant chain Om Hassan is the most improved brand in Egypt with a change in score of 6.6, moving from an Index score of -5.7 in 2018 to +1.0 in 2019.

Chinese device manufacturer Huawei has witnessed an increase in its overall brand health in all three countries. In the UAE and Saudi, it is the second most improved brand and in Egypt it is placed fourth in the list of top ten improvers of 2019.

YouGov also released the global annual brand health rankings for 2019. The global rankings reveal that eight of the top ten healthiest brands in the world are considered tech companies.

Google once again takes the top spot in our yearly ranking, followed by WhatsApp, YouTube, Samsung and Facebook.

In fact, the only non-tech brands to crack the top 10 in the annual ranking are Nike, the US shoe company that caused a stir with its advertising campaign in 2018, and IKEA, which remains strong just like last year.

For this year’s list, YouGov used data from 29 countries – data from markets that cover three sectors or fewer were not counted in the global top 10.

Methodology:

These brands were rated using YouGov BrandIndex’s Index score which is a measure of overall brand health which takes into account consumers’ perceptions of a brand’s quality, value, impression, satisfaction, reputation and whether they would recommend the brand to others.

The Index Rankings list shows the brands with the highest average Index scores between July 1, 2018 and June 30, 2019. The Index Improvers list ranks the brands with the highest increase in Index comparing scores from the previous year. Both scores are representative of the general population. — SG