• Bloomberg, Monday, May 9, 2011 11:37 AM

Aided by the iPad boom and deep consumer loyalty, Apple has overtaken Google to become the world's most valuable brand. That's according to a new report from WPP's Millward Brown unit, which found that Apple's brand value climbed 84% in the past year to $153.3 billion, while Google's brand lost 2% to $111.5 billion -- ending four years atop the rankings.

"It's clear that every single Apple employee, from Steve Jobs and Tim Cook to the summer interns, see protecting and nurturing that brand as a top priority," Millward Brown CEO Eileen Campbell wrote in the report. "Tablet computing also drove value growth not just for Apple, but also for the providers who support yet another networked device."

Also, as Bloomberg points out, "Facebook ... had a 246 percent climb in brand value, the fastest, to become the No. 35 brand at $19.1 billion." "What does this mean, exactly?" asks mocoNews. Calculating a company's brand ranking is done with a bit of math, using a few proprietary indexes from the researchers themselves and numbers off the companies' balance sheets."

"Confusingly, Apple's brand is worth less than the stock market reckons, and Google is also valued more highly by financial analysts than by the marketing department," The Register notes. CNNMoney.com calls the report a "53-page crash course on the principles of modern global marketing." Calling Apple's brand ascendency the "most useless stat of the day," a skeptical Forbes writes: "These rankings -- especially with their decimal point accuracy -- are completely meaningless ... This is all marketing mumbo jumbo."

All that said, in real terms, Apple did overtake Microsoft to become the most-valuable technology company by market value in 2010, Bloomberg notes.

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