November 17th, 2021, Bhawna Singh
Homegrown brands dominate the brand rankings this year, highlighting the strength of local brands within the kingdom
Saudia brand perceptions are soaring and have helped the brand dethrone Almarai to become the top-ranked brand in YouGov’s 2021 Best Brand Rankings for Saudi Arabia. Despite travel restrictions and grounding of flights for extended periods owing to the ongoing pandemic, Saudia has made notable improvements to its brand perception and climbed up two places to come first (51.9) in the 2021 Best Brand rankings.
The rankings are based on the Index score from YouGov BrandIndex, which is a measure of overall brand health that indicates how well a brand is delivering against its brand promise on key attributes and is calculated by taking the average of the Impression, Quality, Value, Satisfaction, Recommend and Reputation scores collected in BrandIndex
Adidas makes a new entry in the top 10 in the Kingdom, straight in second (50.3) and Al Baik moves down one place to third this year (50.3) despite seeing its brand health score improve by +1.2 points from the same time last year.
Almarai, the highly regarded dairy brand, drops down three places to fourth (48.7) while Apple climbs up four places to take the fifth position (41.4). Apple’s competitor Samsung did not record much change to its score but moved up two places to eighth (40.0) in this year’s rankings.
On the other hand, digital giant YouTube witnessed a decline in its score over the past year and moved down four places to ninth (39.8). Al Rajhi Bank and Galaxy chocolates made a brand new entry into the list in seventh (40.3) and tenth (38.8), respectively.
The rankings also show the brands which have improved the most over the past 12 months. STC Saudi Telecom is the most improved brand of the year yet again, with a change in score of +6.0.
noon.com has landed the second-best improver ranking, with a change in score of 5.0.
Saudi Arabia’s improvers list has multiple food and beverage brands such as McDonald’s (+4.6), Vimto (+3.1), KFC (+2.8) and Herfy (+2.7), all showing improvements during the course of the last year.
In addition to being one of the top 10 brands in the 2021 KSA rankings, Saudia and Al Rajhi Bank also feature in the top 10 improvers, with changes of +4.4 and +4.2, respectively in their scores.
Completing the 2021 improvers list in KSA are LG (+2.9) and Green Mountain Park (+2.7).
Methodology
The brands in YouGov Annual Rankings were ranked based on the Index score, which is a measure of overall brand health calculated by taking the average of Impression, Quality, Value, Satisfaction, Recommend and Reputation scores for the full year.
The Index Rankings chart shows the brands with the highest average Index scores between October 1, 2020 and September 30, 2021. The Index Improvers chart ranks the brands with the highest increase in Index, comparing scores from the previous 12-month period. To be included in the improver list, the variance must be positive. Both scores are representative of the general population of adults 18+ (some are online representative).
All Index scores listed have been rounded to a single decimal place; however, we have used additional precision to assign ranks.
All brands have been tracked for at least 6 months to be included in the rankings and have been tracked for at least 18 months to appear in the Improvers tables.
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