Now CNN is in on the survey...

I’m watching CNN International in my hotel room, and now they’re giving coverage to the “brand of the year” farce that I pointed out a few hours ago. “Respondents from 72 countries were asked…” They’re referring to this survey at Brandchannel.com – and BrandChannel explains their “methodology” (ahem) thusly:

For the purposes of brandchannel’s Readers’ Choice Brand of the Year survey, we asked respondents to make their choices based on the brands that had the most impact on their lives in 2002. Impact can be positive or negative; similarly the brand can be on the road to ruin, the cusp of collapse, the brink of bankruptcy, or some other awful alliteration and still qualify as having an impact (for instance, ex-energy company Enron got 3 percent of the US/Canada vote).
The most important thing about qualifying as a brand of the year is that you noticed it in 2002. This will explain the highly visible personalities and organizations that were submitted as write-in votes including David Beckham, Jennifer Lopez, Kylie Minogue, Iraq, al Jazeera, and al Qaeda.
The survey was hosted online at brandchannel.com during November and December of 2002. Readers were allowed to vote once for each region and complete the demographics section once. No section of the survey was mandatory, which explains the varying response rates by region. Respondents from 72 countries participated in the survey; the strongest age group was 26 to 35 with nearly a third as many women as men participating overall.
The brandchannel readership overall comprises an above-average, intelligent group of professionals and students from over 90 countries and a range of industries who are interested in issues involving branding.

There are most definitely more troublesome things to be worried about today, but this just gets under my skin.