The Brands With The Best Global Reputations Are The Ones That Make Our Gadgets

Among the world's most valuable companies, consumer awareness is highest for tech brands like Google, Apple, Microsoft, and Samsung.

Google may be mired in debates over privacy, but it's still the world's top company brand, according to the latest FutureBrand Index. As a top-ranked "future brand," the company is also likely to succeed going forward because of its strong visions of purpose, user experience, and sustainability, according to the index.

Created by global brand consultancy FutureBrand, the index gauges the "brand strength" of the world's 100 most valuable companies. Its scoring is based on a survey of more than 3,000 people in 16 countries.

These are the top 20 brands:

Many of the top brands are in the tech sector--in fact, Silicon Valley has a strong presence overall in the top brand rankings. It's not too surprising to see consumer-facing brands like Google, Apple, and Disney ranking at the top, but companies like SABIC and AbbVie, which don't sell directly to the general public, somehow still manage to round out the top ranked organizations.

Here are the bottom 20 brands among the world's most valuable companies:

No big surprises here. Lots of oil companies, banks, and a couple tobacco companies wedged in for good measure.

In addition to the top 100 rankings, FutureBrand also picked out 22 companies to be labeled as future brands because of respondents' desire to buy products and work for them--a sign that they will succeed in the future. These companies include many of the top-ranked brands overall, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Disney, Intel, IBM, and Toyota. If these rankings are to be believed, tech companies will have the strongest brands for the foreseeable future. That should be obvious to anyone who has seen the way people clamor for jobs at places like Google and Apple.

While energy and financial organizations struggled in the rankings, FutureBrand believes that the companies that become known for their good ethics in these sectors will do well in the future. The report explains:

Those companies that can demonstrate they are leading change in their industry in relation to obvious areas like the environment and corporate social responsibility, will not only better attend to stakeholder needs, but also will differentiate from their competition. This is not least because the sectors still seem to be hampered by broadly weak or negative perceptions in the wake of the global financial crisis and concerns about the viability of our dependency on fossil fuels: hence the larger negative disparity between market cap and FutureBrand Index ranking for most of the organizations in these sectors.

Check out the full report here.