According to a study by the Psychonomics market research institute, the German brand „Nivea“ and the internet brand „Google“ were among the most popular brands in Germany in the year 2008. In the course of this study most popular brands were defined in eight important lines of industry. The respective findings were based on about 250.000 interviews.
Popularity of brands in Germany is measured on the basis of the YouGov BrandIndex. For the brand “Audi” this index amounts to 78.9 points which is the highest index value reached among car manufacturers. It also turned out that Audi is the only German car manufacturer the image of which did not suffer in the wake of the crisis on the German automobile market.
With regard to financial institutions, almost all brands had to put up with image losses. The only exception were the „Sparkassen“ (saving banks) and the „Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken“ (cooperative banks). That financial institution with the best image was the ING-Diba brand with an annual BrandIndex of 54 points followed by the “Sparkassen” and “Volks- und Raiffeisenbanken”.
Lufthansa was the German airline with the best brand image (75.6 points) even though the image of this company had suffered after a strike. With regard to retail trade businesses the drug store chain “dm” was the most popular brand name followed by “Tchibo” and “Rossmann”.
In the insurance industry the ADAC insurances were Germany’s most popular brands in 2008 (77.3 points) followed by the HUK Coburg insurance which reached 55.2 points in the BrandIndex.
O2 was Germany’s favorite brand among mobile phone providers (20.6 points) ahead of Vodafone. The relatively low index level of about 20 points demonstrates the fact that Germans have currently quite a skeptical attitude with regard to telecommunications.
The YouGov BrandIndex is a daily monitoring index for brand names. About 1000 people are interviewed each day in order to analyze the image of more than 500 brands from 20 lines of industry. 