There are countless ways to measure how strong a brand is: ad budget, reach, follower count, awareness. But the research that stood out in 2025 puts a single question ahead of all of them: do a brand’s customers recommend it to other people? YouGov’s annual ranking measures exactly that question — and its answer shows that brand strength is now built on recommendation, not advertising.

What YouGov measured

YouGov’s “Most Recommended Brands 2025” ranking rests on a simple but powerful metric: what percentage of a brand’s customers would recommend it to a friend or colleague? The ranking was built from over a million customer surveys across 28 markets, using 12 months of data from 1 June 2024 to 31 May 2025.

The global top places:

  • Emirates — 88.4%
  • Toyota — 84.7%
  • Levi’s — 83.1%
  • adidas — 82.5%
  • Nintendo — 82.1%
  • Nike — 82.0%
  • followed by Mercedes-Benz, BMW, Trivago, and Neutrogena (all 80%+)

What’s notable isn’t the list itself but what it measures: not ad recall or reach, but advocacy. A customer recommending a brand is proof they’ve gone one step beyond buying it — that they trust it enough to lend it their own personal reputation.

Why is recommendation the strongest signal?

Because consumers no longer trust brands — they trust each other. The data measuring this has been consistent for years:

  • According to Nielsen, roughly 92% of consumers trust recommendations from friends and family more than any form of advertising.
  • 88% of people trust online reviews written by strangers almost as much as a personal recommendation.
  • A word-of-mouth impression can drive about 5x more sales than a paid-media impression.
  • 74% of consumers name word of mouth as a decisive factor in their purchase decisions.

The picture is clear: advertising buys visibility, recommendation transfers trust. And trust is a brand’s most expensive and least imitable asset.

What this means for influencer marketing

Influencer marketing is, at its core, word of mouth at scale: a trusted person’s word standing in for the brand’s own. But the industry usually measures it with the wrong metric — likes and reach. What YouGov’s ranking tells us is that a campaign’s real success isn’t “how many people did it reach” but “how many people did it convince enough to recommend it.”

A post can be seen millions of times; but if the audience just says “nice post” and scrolls on, that campaign produced no advocacy. Conversely, a far less-seen post whose comments read “I’d recommend this to everyone,” “ordered it right away,” “my friend will love this” — that campaign produced the very signal YouGov measures.

Reach tells you how many people saw it; recommendation tells you how many were convinced.

How to measure the recommendation signal in comments

Whether a campaign produced advocacy shows up, most honestly, in the comments. The signals to look for:

  • Recommendation phrases — direct advocacy lines like “definitely buy it,” “I’d recommend it to everyone,” “you won’t regret it.” These are the purest sign of advocacy.
  • Purchase intent — “what’s the price?”, “where can I get it?”, “is there a link?” — interest turning into intent.
  • Tagging a friend — someone tagging an acquaintance under a post is word of mouth happening in real time.
  • Sentiment — is praise, indifference, or disappointment dominant? Recommendation is only ever built on top of genuine positive tone.

These signals tell you something far beyond a like count: not just whether the audience saw the brand, but whether they own it enough to defend it.

Summary

YouGov’s 2025 ranking underlines one truth: what makes a brand strong isn’t how much it’s seen, but how much it’s recommended. The same rule holds for influencer campaigns — what you should measure isn’t reach, but the recommendation and advocacy produced. The catch is that this signal doesn’t show up in a like count; it’s hidden inside the comments. That’s exactly what Vibemetri does: it reads a campaign’s comments one by one with AI and classifies them by recommendation phrasing, purchase intent, and sentiment, so you get a concrete answer to “did this campaign produce recommendation?” Take a look at Vibemetri.

The ranking and percentages in this article are from YouGov’s “Most Recommended Brands 2025” report; the word-of-mouth statistics are compiled from Nielsen and public industry sources. Brand names are cited only as research examples.