• by Laurie Sullivan  @lauriesullivan, June 10, 2015

Household names like Apple, Chipotle, Facebook, Intel, and Verizon fill the top half of Millward Brown's list of the top 20 most loved brands, but the Chinese search engine Baidu snuck in at No. 10.

Love isn't everything, but loved brands increase more rapidly in value. Over the past 10 years, the rise in value for brands scoring high in the BrandZ "Love" metric was 10 times greater than the rising value for brands scoring low in Love, per the report.

Love measures the emotional affinity of a brand. It usually follows great performance. Some brands do all the right things, but are not loved, a key component of making a brand meaningful. Loved brands seem to try harder at understanding the world from the customer's point of view.

Love helped China's top search engine increase its monthly active users of mobile search to more than 500 million, per the report. Aside from Baidu, the Chinese social site Tencent became the second Chinese Internet brand to make the top 10, while the third, Alibaba, entered the BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands this year as a newcomer.

The Chinese e-commerce brand Alibaba rose to first place in the retail category in the the BrandZ Top 100 for the first time, following its record breaking IPO in which it raised $25 billion on the New York Stock Exchange. These three Chinese brands create an enormous ecosystem to serve the online needs of Chinese consumers, each supporting a different type of online user.

Six of the Top 20 Risers in the BrandZ report are technology brands: Facebook, Apple, Intel, Tencent, Baidu and Microsoft. Each grew in value because of the overall power of the technology category. Facebook almost doubled in value based on key acquisitions that kept the brand relevant with younger users. The company also improved its mobile presence, grew advertising sales, and managed to monetize an audience of more than 1 billion people worldwide.