iPhone No Longer Coolest Brand, Says Aston Martin’s “Cool Brands” Index [iPhone Gets Knocked Out Of The Top Slot By Another Familiar Brand In The Aston Martin Cool Brands Index]

Posted on TFTS by Steve Anderson on Wednesday, 28. September 2011 under: Audio,Visual, Cars, Mobile/Cell Phones, Mp3 Players & PMPs, Transportation Tech

Interesting bit of news for the Apple buffs out there; apparently, the crew out at Aston Martin, the guys who give us those sweet James Bond rides also maintain an index of the top brands in Great Britain. And the iPhone, which has held the top slot for quite some time, has been knocked out. But you probably won’t believe just who it was that took down Apple in the rankings.

iPhone got taken down its peg by no less than Aston Martin itself, which might have some folks crying foul in that it’s Aston Martin’s list to begin with. But seeing as the list is a compilation effort of surveys of 2000 consumers, and a panel of 35 style experts (designers, magazine editors and website brass), it’s not as though Aston Martin meddled with the list.

Apparently, Brits’ desire to own one of the sweet James Bond rides, which has been in play for over a hundred years on some level (that’s about how long Aston Martin has been around in the first place) has managed to get a little of its own back against cutting edge hardware like the iPhone. But the strangest thing is that on the list, Apple doesn’t show up until number 13 on the top 20 list. iPhone, meanwhile, takes the second place slot (formerly first until this newest revision) and iPod shows up at third.

The rest of the top twenty, meanwhile, is rounded out with:

Blackberry
Bang & Olufsen
Harley-Davidson
Nintendo Wii
Google
Ferrari
Dom Perignon
BBC iPlayer
Vivienne Westwood
Apple
Tate Modern
YouTube
Mini
Chanel
Ray-Ban
Alexander McQueen
Jimmy Choo

Many surprises likely come up on that list. In fact, the whole list seems somewhat preposterous as they’re bouncing wildly between products and brand names across a host of industries. Champagne comes up on the same list as three vehicles and a line of sunglasses. Apple gets three slots on the list, and four if you count the BBC iPlayer. Google, meanwhile, gets two with Google and YouTube. Still though, it is interesting to see where the survey pegs the big brand names, even if 2000 respondents is a bit small for a country of around 60 million.

So what do you guys think of this list? Is it a good representation of the British style? Or is it entirely too schizophrenic to have much real value? Either way, we want to hear from you, so head on down to the comments section and tell us what you think!

Conego Francisco+
I doubt that you could get 2000 people to agree to a definition of “cool”, let alone create a worthwhile survey. Taste is personal– a lot of folk think a Smart Car is cooler that a high-end SUV (mostly those without children and who live in cities with lousy parking– two Smart Cars will fit in one SUV slot), and a lot of other folks (Montanans, Secret Service Agents)think a big scary SUV with tinted windows and an engine the size of a Smart Car is the coolest thing around.
I have to admit I’ve never succeeded at trying to be ‘cool’, although to my embarrassment, over the past 50 years I’ve come into style two or three times at least (I wore Indiana Jones hats for years before the first movie… then it it became impossible to find one that didn’t have a little metal pin on the hatband that read “Indiana Jones”, so I had to stick mine in the closet until the craze wore off, and then there was the ‘blue jeans with a corduroy sports coat’ that I wore in college, only to discover a few years later that Hollywood directors were doing the same thing. Pure chance, I know, but the idea that Hollywood directors have been spying on me is a bit rattling!).