Many of the 100 most valuable brands from 2001, lost much of their value between then and 2009. Many of these brand declines are predictable, given the fate of their sectors.

Car companies such as Ford fared poorly. So did major pharmaceutical firms including Merck.  Some brands that were aging in 2001 have been so badly beaten down that they are no longer on the Interbrand 100, the benchmark that 24/7 Wall St. used to make its calculations. Interbrand is one of the biggest brand value measurement and consultancy services in the world.

These are the  24/7 Wall St. Ten Brands That Have Lost The Most Value This Decade:

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1. Ford
2001: $30 billion (8th most valuable brand of 2001)
2009: $7 billion (49th most valuable brand of 2009)

Ford was part of the still-successful Big Three in 2001. The company’s stock price was nearly $26 then compared with less than $12 today. Ford has suffered for a long time as consumers’ opinions of its quality worsened. Japanese car companies gained market share throught the last decade. And in some cases they moved to the top of customer satisfaction surveys. Ford also suffered from the negative publicity that the GM and Chrysler bankruptcies brought to the domestic industry.

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2. Compaq
2001: $12 billion (24th most valuable brand of 2001)
2009: No longer on Interbrand’s Top 100

Compaq was arguably the most well-respected PC company in the United States in 2001. The firm was early into the sub-$1,000 PC market and entered the enterprise computer market when it bought Digital Equipment. Compaq was purchased in 2001 by Hewlett-Packard in one of the most acrimonious M&A deals of the last decade. Compaq became a sub-brand within the PC company and is now simply part of a large line of products.

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3. Kodak
2001: $10 billion (27th most valuable brand of 2001)
2009: No longer on Interbrand’s Top 100

Eastman Kodak owned the digital camera market at the beginning of this decade. It also had a presence in enterprise printing. The company lost ground to Japanese competitors and to Hewlett-Packard in the printer segment.  Nikon, Panasonic and Canon are now among the leaders in the digital camera industry. Kodak traded for $47 in 2001. It has dropped more than 90% since then.

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4. Citibank
2001: $19 billion (13th most valuable brand of 2001)
2009: $10 billion (36th most valuable brand of 2009)

Citi has suffered from a number of damaging events, most of them over the last three years. The financial firm nearly became insolvent due to the credit crisis. It fired one CEO and his replacement was on a number of “worst CEO” lists, including ours. In 2001, Citi’s share price was nearly $60 and was still above $45 before the financial markets collapsed. Citi was rescued by the government, and for a time was nearly a ward of the state. Its shares still trade at less than $4 after moving below a dollar in 2009.

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5. Merck.
2001: $9 billion (29th most valuable brand of 2001)
2009: No longer on Interbrand’s Top 100

The big pharma company was in the No.1 spot on the Fortune “Most Admired Companies” list for six years until 1993. It stayed near the top of that list for another decade. The Vioxx scandal wrecked the company’s image, and it has only just now begun to recover. The arthritis drug turned out to cause heart problems.  Merck was attacked in 2004 by medical experts who said that it knew of the trouble as early as 2000. More than 50,000 people have made legal claims against the company. Merck’s share price was $93 a decade ago. It is now $36.

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6. Sony Ericsson.
2001: $7 billion (36th most valuable brand of 2001)
2009: No longer on Interbrand’s Top 100

The joint venture cellular phone company began in 2001. At the time, it was viewed as a combination of the best of two of the largest technology companies in the world. The new firm claimed that it could become a leader in the sector, but failed almost from the start to do so. The company lost money the first three years it was in business and fell behind Nokia, Samsung, and Motorola. Sony Ericsson was one of the first cell phone companies to introduce handsets with cameras, but the innovation came too late. The mobile phone company had started out as the perfect marriage of two powerful brands, but that was not enough to sustain sales.

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7. Sun Microsytems
2001: $5 billion (53rd most valuable brand of 2001)
2009: No longer on Interbrand’s Top 100

Sun was supposed to be the next Microsoft, or at least the next HP. Like many of the tech giants, it was formed in the late 1980s. The company was badly hurt by the dotcom crash in 2001, but it had recovered by 2004 when it launched a number of high-end servers. It allowed itself to be flanked in these businesses by IBM and Hitachi. New management could not reverse the slide and the company was sold to Oracle because it could no longer operate as a standalone entity.

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8. Merrill Lynch
2001: $15 billion (19th most valuable brand in 2001)
2009: No longer on Interbrand’s Top 100

Merrill Lynch was the largest retail brokerage firm in America in 2001 and had a large institutional investing and investment banking operation. The company had nearly 15,000 brokers in 2005. In 2002, Merrill was part of a settlement with the SEC for publishing misleading research. Merrill was also accused of helping Enron perpetuate fraud. In 2008, the credit crisis nearly put Merrill out of business due to the amount of toxic assets on its balance sheet. It was sold to Bank of America in 2009.

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9. Kleenex
2001: $5 billion (54th most valuable brand in 2001)
2009: No longer on Interbrand’s Top 100

The cotton towels which eventually became Kleenex were developed in the 1920s. Kimberly Clark has owned the brand for several decades. It is hard to say that one or another thing hurt the Kleenex brand. The most likely explanation is that cheaper tissues took over a great deal of the market. The other factor that may have pushed down sales of the brand was that competition that did not exist from paper towel and paper napkins ate into Kleenex sales.

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10. Pfizer
2001: $8.9 billion (30th most valuable brand in 2001)
2009: No longer on Interbrand’s Top 100

Pfizer is one of the largest pharma companies in the world. It has suffered from the same problems as many of its peers – a perception that drug companies put profits above safety, and a belief that big pharma overcharges for drugs and are part of the problem with healthcare costs. Pfizer pleaded guilty in 2009 to the largest health care fraud in US history and received the largest criminal penalty ever levied as a result of illegal marketing of several of its drugs.

-Douglas A. McIntyre, Ashley C. Allen

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