Almarai is the most positively perceived brand in Saudi Arabia

The food and beverage company continues to have the best brand health among Saudi consumers

Almarai again tops YouGov BrandIndex’s annual brand health rankings for Saudi Arabia. In a list featuring a large number of digital brands, the food and beverage company reigns supreme for the second year in a row.

The brand maintains its dominant position among Saudi consumers, sitting ahead of restaurant chain Al Baik, streaming giant YouTube, and messenger service WhatsApp.

These rankings are based on the YouGov BrandIndex Index score, which measures overall brand health. The score takes into account consumers’ perception of a brand’s overall quality, value, impression, reputation, satisfaction and whether consumers would recommend the brand to others.

Al Baik’s score has steadily increased over the past year, rising from 42.3 to 47.4. The last 12 months have seen it gain exposure from two popular vloggers who, in a video that garnered close to two million views, created a pizza using Al Baik’s ingredients.

One of the most interesting movements in the rankings is the large strides made by Saudia over the past year. The national carrier tops YouGov’s most improved brand health list – increasing its scores by +8.9 over the last 12 months – enough to launch it into eighth position overall.

Multinational supermarket Carrefour has improved its brand health score by +6.4 points in the past year, helping it to top the Saudi retail sector rankings.

The changes in the law that allow women to drive in KSA has opened a new valuable market for auto manufacturers. While Toyota is the most popular car maker in the region, Kia has seen a notable improvement, increasing its brand health score by +4.6.

Global rankings

YouGov also releases the global annual brand health rankings for 2018. These rankings are based on six million interviews conducted in 26 countries.

Google tops the annual global brand health rankings, followed by YouTube. Samsung jumps one place from last year, climbing to third position as does messenger service WhatsApp, which rises to fourth. However, WhatsApp’s parent company, Facebook, falls two places to fifth. While Amazon remains sixth on the list, IKEA and Lego enter the rankings at number seven and ten, respectively.

To assess the global brand health rankings, YouGov looked at data from across 26 countries. YouGov created top 10 lists for each country. The global top 10 was created by scoring brands in each list – the top brand scored ten points while the tenth brand scored one point. The brands with the most points overall form the global top ten. All data is from 1 July 2017 to 30 June 2018.