This needs to be treated with a whole lot of caution, if not outright scepticism.

Here's an extract from page 11, which describes their 'methodology'.

The brand value published is based on the intrinsic value of the brand — derived from its ability to generate demand. The dollar value of each brand in the ranking is the sum of all future earnings that brand is forecast to generate, discounted to a present day value.

What that highlighted bit means is, they GUESSED how much it will sell in the future, then divided it by something.

WTF?

We could all do that, but we'd all come up with different numbers. This just means that they are American, and hence expect Microsoft to win and Sony to not win.

yes people actually reading the report .... you rock ..... 

Hmm I would have thought 360's failure rates of old (and still nowadays) would have affected it more than that. Guess not.

Xbox above ps2.

lol

The data cited here is terrible...there is no region where Wii has sold 34 million for instance.

I have to agree the wii data is terrible, but i feel it may be a misstype as the other data is right i feel they should have put in 43 million which would be more in line with our figures, the rest of their data is very close to ours, I may shoot them an email about this on tuesday, i doub they will respond but at least I wold have tried

Its not as bad as you're making it out to be.  For a brand analysis to be valid, they need to estimate what future earnings will be possible with it, assuming current trends.  And it obviously is about future earnings because who cares about the past, they're done and over with.  Sony for example will only care about how much they can sell in the future, not what if they changed their launch strategy 3 yrs ago. 

And when you "forecast" earnings, its ALL guessing, some guesses are however more accurate than others.  Taking some random guy off the street and having him guess the sales numbers for Gears of War 2 will be less accurate than taking TheSource and having him guess.

The discounted to a present day value part you are misunderstanding.  Its taking about NPV (net present value) and is used in all financial analysis to take into account ROI and effects of interest rates.  (i.e. money is worth more today than the same amount in 10 yrs due to inflation/etc)  In fact, not doing a NPV analysis will invalidate your results. 

I think it is really as bad as I'm making it out to be - if not worse (but fair point on NPV - I simplified for impact).

See, the estimate of future earnings is made blind; the costs that they take out they don't know either; and they assume current trends - when probably the one thing we can be certain of is that current trends don't mostly continue.

And it is a bit disingenuous to say the past doesn't matter, because it clearly does, as it is all they have to go on.

So really all they have to go on in the gaming sphere is that Wii wins, Xbox 360 second and PS3 third. 

And we know that already.

And doing some fancy calculations to derive a 'brand value' from it doesn't really add anything. Unless you are a marketing director wanting a pay rise (which is why marketing directors like this sort of stuff).