Apple and Google top branding survey

In a recent branding survey conducted by online magazine Brandjournal, Apple and Google were named the two top brands worldwide. Al-Jazeera was surprisingly ranked fifth, ostensibly due to its unique slant on news. The terminology of the survey may be one of the main reasons for the unconventional results, as it asked respondents to quantify the impact which brands had on their lives instead of asking which ones had the highest monetary value (which would likely produce a different result entirely). Apple's branding recognition has been driven by its iPod line of music players (including the recently introduced iPod Shuffle), while Google's fortunes were helped by its splashy IPO last year (and, undoubtedly, the Spartan yet useful search tools and website that bear its name). Both stocks have performed tremendously well recently, though in my opinion they could be overvalued and they both face considerable challenges to the fields they have pioneered. While both are good companies, I am not sure if either or both are good stocks.