Companies & Brands Quiz — 7 Free Questions

Question 1

Which company, headquartered in a ring-shaped building in Cupertino, California, was the first to be worth one trillion dollars on the stock market, then two, then three, and has spent much of the past decade as the most valuable public company in the world?

Question 2

Which company grew out of a 1996 research project by two Stanford graduate students, originally called BackRub, that ranked web pages by counting the links pointing to them?

Question 3

Which carmaker, run from Austin, Texas, is worth more on the stock market than any other car company in the world, despite building a small fraction of the vehicles that the largest Japanese and German groups do?

Question 4

Which German automotive group, run from Wolfsburg, owns a stable of marques that runs from mass-market to hypercar: Audi, Porsche, Skoda, SEAT, Bentley, Lamborghini, Ducati motorcycles and the truck makers Scania and MAN?

Question 5

Which Anglo-Dutch consumer-goods company owns Dove soap, Lynx and Axe body spray, Hellmann's mayonnaise, Knorr stock cubes, Magnum ice cream, Vaseline and the Domestos bleach brand?

Question 6

The rugged cowboy figure used in advertising from the 1950s until such ads were banned, several of whose real-life models later died of smoking-related illness, promoted which cigarette brand?

Question 7

Which company was founded in 1939 in a rented garage in Palo Alto, California, now marked as the birthplace of Silicon Valley, by two engineering graduates who tossed a coin to decide whose surname would come first in the name?

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About Companies & Brands

This quiz is about companies and brands: what the big firms own and make, where they came from, the brand families that sit under a single parent, the slogans and mascots everyone knows, and the landmark mergers and renamings. One hundred questions, each describing a company, a brand, a parent group, a founding story or a deal, and asking you to name it from four choices of the same kind, then explaining it. It is a test of knowledge, not of recognising a logo.

The first pack is the giants and the superlatives: the most valuable listed companies, the biggest carmaker, the biggest retailer, the biggest brewer, the biggest asset manager. The second pack is the consumer-goods parents, the handful of firms behind the supermarket shelf, from Unilever and Procter and Gamble to Nestle, Mars, Diageo and L'Oreal, identified by the brands they own. The third pack is founding stories and name origins, how Nike, Lego, IKEA, Google, Starbucks, Rolex and Sony got started and got their names. The fourth pack is slogans, mascots and corporate history: Just Do It, A Diamond Is Forever, the Michelin Man, Tony the Tiger, and renamings such as Facebook to Meta and Google to Alphabet. The fifth pack turns to India: the Tata and Birla and Mahindra and Adani groups, TCS and Infosys and Wipro, Reliance Jio, Amul, ITC, Maruti Suzuki, the State Bank of India and Flipkart.

Many of the questions in the middle packs work by listing a cluster of well-known household brands, from soap and mayonnaise to whisky and pet food, and asking which single parent company sits above them all, which is often a surprise. Others give a slogan or a mascot and ask whose it is, or describe a company at its beginning, a garage, a market stall, a mail-order catalogue, a saddle-maker's workshop, and ask what it grew into. The India pack covers the big diversified houses and the firms, in software, telecoms, cars, banking, dairy and online retail, that dominate the country's corporate landscape.

The wrong answers are always other companies or brands of the same kind, so a good guess is easily checked. Around a quarter of the questions carry a neutral photograph, a trading floor, an exchange, a banknote, coins, a container ship, that fits any of the four options and so gives nothing away, since the answer can never be read off a picture of a stock exchange. The people who built these firms are covered in the next quiz, Entrepreneurs and Business Leaders; here the answer is always the company, the brand or the deal, and this quiz tests knowledge rather than logo recognition, which belongs to the Guess and Identify set. Ownership, dates and origins have been checked against standard reference works and were current in early 2026.