Global brand health rankings reveal utility wins every time

Brand health determines whether consumers choose you, ignore you or actively avoid you. It lives in the minds of the public – their perception shaped by an accumulation of reputation, trust and experience that can be hard to get a handle on without the right measurement. For global brands it can be even harder – understanding consumer sentiment internationally where media consumption, competitors and cultures can vary so widely and shape perceptions in different ways.

This year's YouGov Best Brand Rankings gets to the heart of this. It takes a global view of consumer sentiment, distilling brand health into one metric drawn from six critical measures: impression, quality, value, satisfaction, reputation and recommendation.

It assesses brands' health across 28 markets – from large economies such as the US, China, Germany and Japan to massive markets including Brazil, India and Indonesia as well as fast emerging countries like Saudi Arabia and Thailand. We speak to real people every day about their feelings towards brands and this global ranking is based on more than six million interviews which took place across 2025.

So, what does the top ten tell us?

Unpacking the scores: what drives brand health?

The ranking is based on an overall brand health score, which is a composite of six key dimensions: impression, quality, value, satisfaction, reputation and recommend. While the top three brands – WhatsApp, Samsung and YouTube – are tightly grouped in terms of overall scores, there are differences in the sub-scores.

For example, WhatsApp excels in value, satisfaction and when it comes to people recommending it to others. Meanwhile, Samsung is up on quality and reputation, suggesting that people feel proud associating with the brand. This variation shows that even among top global brands, the facets of brand health can differ significantly and provide deeper insight into what drives consumer perception.

Mass utility, mass appeal

As this list is made from the views of everyday people and based on metrics that matter in their daily lives, it is a global ranking based on brands with mass appeal – to make the top ten, they needed to perform well across multiple metrics and multiple markets.

While tech brands dominate this list – taking the top four positions – what links these diverse brands together is their mass utility. Each brand on the list is now integral to many people's daily lives, whether it's a communication tool like WhatsApp, a content platform like YouTube or a brand like Dettol that has become synonymous with household cleanliness. Indeed, many of these brands pass the "Hoover" test – where they can be seen as category defining and becoming shorthand for what they do.

WhatsApp: Consumers like the message

WhatsApp is a rare brand – a platform that is ubiquitous across the globe except the US. It claims the number one brand position in Spain, ranks second among Australia's most improved brands, and secures top ten status across France, Germany, Indonesia, Singapore and the UK, but it has yet to break into the top American top twenty.

Using YouGov's new BrandIndex Voices tool – which harnesses AI to analyze large-scale qualitative conversations - consumers stated what drives their preference for the brand: international reach, cross-platform reliability and an almost obsessive focus on pure messaging, untainted by the social media noise that clutters its competitors.

“WhatsApp feels simpler and more personal,” explained one user as other options “feel more mixed in with social media, ads and people I don't talk to often. WhatsApp stays focused on just messaging.” It's this focus – combined with seamless portability across devices and borders – that consumers say makes the brand a top choice from Jakarta to Madrid.

What brand managers should take from this

Brand health data can sometimes be seen as a score to defend rather than a signal to use. It should be watched continuously, instead of consulted selectively. If you only look when performance dips, it may already be too late. The value lies in seeing change early, while there is still room to adjust pricing, product, experience or messaging. Brand health may not make decisions for brands, but it does make it easier to understand what consumers are telling you.