Marissa Mayer's magic? Yahoo back in top global brands list

Maybe it’s Marissa Mayer.

Beleaguered search giant Yahoo has found itself in the elite BrandZ list of top 100 brands after a gap of four years. Yahoo was listed as number 91 on the list that is still headed by Apple.

Yahoo’s brand value was estimated at $9.8 billion, which is still down from its $11.4 billion in 2008, reported All Things D.

The company is listed as one of the eight newcomers on the list. The other newcomers include Woolworths, Gucci, Prada and BT.

The news came even as Mayer made a $1.1 billion bet on the online blogging forum Tumblr in her attempt to make the former Internet icon cool again.

The deal announced Monday is Mayer’s boldest move since she left Google 10 months ago to lead Yahoo’s latest comeback attempt. It marks Yahoo’s most expensive acquisition since it bought online search engine Overture a decade ago for $1.3 billion in cash and stock.

Mayer told analysts that she is “making a sincere promise to not screw it up.”

Mayer’s efforts at Yahoo have been well-received on Wall Street so far, although most of the 69 percent surge in Yahoo’s stock price under Mayer’s leadership has been driven by the rising value of Yahoo’s remaining 24 percent in Alibaba. When Alibaba goes public within the next few years, analysts have estimated Yahoo could collect another $10 billion to $20 billion by selling the rest of its Alibaba stock.

Despite the return of Yahoo and the dominance of Apple, Facebook, Microsoft and Google however, the report said that technology brand value remained flat.

“In a year of product iteration, rather than innovation, the overall brand value of the technology category remained flat. The race to assemble and dominate ecosystems defined the year for B2C brands. In B2B, some brands discovered opportunities in big data and the cloud, while others struggled to reposition away from device-driven strategies. Without the surge in Apple and Facebook brand value that helped drive category growth, Technology declined 1 percent in the BrandZ 2013 ranking, after five years averaging 8 percent annual category growth”.

The biggest growth was seen in the Consumer categories sector, which the report attributed to overall improvement of confidence and spending, despite economic difficulties in Europe and the slowdown in the BRIC markets.

The BrandZ methodology is made up of worldwide, ongoing, in-depth quantitative consumer research, which helps them build up a global picture of brands on a category-by-category, and country-by-country basis.

“Our research covers two million consumers and more than 10,000 different brands in over 30 countries. This intensive, in-market consumer research differentiates the BrandZ methodology from competitors that rely only on a panel of “experts” or purely financial and market desk research”, the company said.