2011 Top 100 Global Brands and Their App Store Status

Distimo October 2011 Report is out and covers state of the App industry looking at Apple App Store for iPhone, Apple App Store for iPad, Google Android Market, Nokia Ovi Store, BlackBerry App World, Windows Phone 7 Marketplace and Amazon Appstore for September 2011. This month’s report focuses on the 2011 best global brands and how they perceive the fragmented app store space.

The major findings are:

• Ninety-one percent of the top brands (as defined by the Interbrand 2011 Best Global Brands report) have a presence in at least one of the major app stores. This is a significant increase compared to 18 months ago when only 51% of the brands published or licensed an application.
• Brands have realized that publishing applications in the various app stores offers a viable channel to promote their brand, reach consumers, and for a subset of brands sell content. This is especially true of companies in the media, business services, and automotive industries who actively use app stores as a way to distribute their content.
• Based on the rank of each brand and when looking at brackets of ten applications at a time, our research reveals that the brands that ranked highest in the 2011 Interbrand Best Global Brands report have more presence in the different app stores in terms of the volume of applications.
• Brands are heavy publishers with 24 applications on average per brand, although this is biased due to a few large publishers (e.g. Disney and Sony). The number of applications per brand without these two brands is still high with 15 applications on average.
• Looking at specific app stores, we see that the Apple App Store for iPhone is by far the most popular app store for the top 100 global brands. Opposed to this, these brands appear to believe that they do not need to have a presence on the Nokia (Symbian / Java) platform given the low number of brands (six) publishing on that platform.
• The Google Android Market and the Apple App Store for iPad are both increasingly seen as good app stores for brands to promote their visibility and reach consumers.
• Most brands in the top 100 are not looking to make money in the app stores, as nearly all of the applications associated with these brands are available for free.
• Only a limited number of brands (27% of the publishers with 32% of the applications) have a strategy to actually make money directly via the app store, including but not limited to Disney, Adobe and Thomson Reuters.

Thanks to our friends from distimo for these awesome stats and graphs - you´ll find the report here