Today, when the number of consumer brands, people and trends is huge and the army of their fans is tremendous, the question of which of them is most well-liked pops up. Following other news websites, Bloomberg Businessweek created its own list of things popular in America now (taking 2010–2011 as the time span), scaling them from 0.75 to 14,594,874,110,347 based on their sales, presence on the market, in social networks, etc.. The rating is “a deep dive into what’s totally beast, right now—not just the bestselling, but the fastest-selling; not merely the market leaders, but the ones gaining the most market share.” The entries are not competing with each other, there are just figures, which represent commercial growth or a range of other indicators.
The rating was posted both on the BBW’s website and published as an annual summer double ‘The Popularity Issue’, which can already be found on newsstands in the USA. The rating (or, more precisely, a list), which begins with 0.75 percent of Americans have celiac disease and ends with the national debt as of 4:34p.m. 59 secs, EDT August 10, 2011 (14,594,874,110,347), includes a range of global consumer brands, which take different position on the chart. For example, there are 14 flavours of Orbit gum, 15 chips in a serving of Lay’s Classic, the best-selling potato chip and 16 percent of U.S. beer market belongs to Bud Light, America’s most popular beer brand. Here are some of the brands which are also featured on the list (as the numbers grow).
35g rams of sugar is consumed with 20 oz. Gatorade sports drink, which tops the category in the USA; the most popular electric car on the U.S. market, Nissan Leaf, can ride 73 miles before the battery dies, and the name of the Levi’s most popular jeans (and “the all-time best-selling garment”) is Levi’s 501.
The first brand in the ‘thousand’ group is Nescafé (not Starbucks), the most favourite coffee around the globe—every second 3,000 cups of this instant coffee is drunk in the world, more than of any other coffee brand. While this brand is more about communication (coffee time is probably the best time to meet with friends), the following one, Microsoft Xbox Kinect, represents the virtual dimension—8m of these devices were purchased in the first 60 days after it appeared on the market. Some numbers are completely weird: for instance, the people behind the rating measured how many strands of Barilla spaghetti (30,609,216 ones) would be used to connect the Ames, Iowa, and Parma, Italy, where plants of the world’s No. 1 pasta maker are located.
293.3m of M&M’s chocolate candies, America’s most popular ones, are manufactured per eight-hour shift and almost twice as more, 618m, dollars is the revenue of Logitech‘s mouse division for selling Logitech M305 as of 2010. If you are a Coca-Cola drinker, you have definitely contributed to this number as well: 1.7bn servings of Coca-Cola are consumed every day. Paper books seem to be on the edge of distinction with the growing power of Amazon’s Kindle e-reader and other devices of this kind—in 2011, 2bn of Kindle were sold. Kraft Foods brand Oreo, which gathered most likes on Facebook in 24 hours this February, is feeding the whole world with its chocolate and creamy cookies—approx. 12bn of Oreo cookies are consumed every year around the globe. The last consumer brand on the list is Nestlé Purina PetCare, the No. 1 pet care company in the USA, which revenue for 2010 is 12.5bn.
Of course, Bloomberg Businessweek could attach a figure to each popular global or local brand, but it decided to narrow the range of brand to nearly 20. Nike, PepsiCo, Google (subbrands of the last two ones—Gatorade and YouTube—are featured) and others are out, but technically speaking, there might be some data on how many shoes with a swoosh are sold per minute, how many milliseconds Google Chrome loads a page or how many plastic bottles Coca-Cola’s rival helps to recycle each day. Maybe, BBW just wanted to give them a break?