Below are the best selling products over decades...!!!
Since people of the era have become highly brand-conscious, opting only branded items for everything from toys to luxury cars; various manufactures and companies tend to market their products under their corporate brands, accompanying with massive advertising.
While some of these branded products succeed to capture consumer attention, some others fail to survive in the heavily competitive market.
Yet other products are there, which are tempting the buyers of all ages from their inception in the market. They have turned the best-selling products of all time.
Here is a global list compiled by 247wallst.com of 10 evergreen best-selling products that not only broke all records, but have also changed our lives. Let us have a look!
#10 PlayStation
Category: Video game console
Units sold/sales: 300-plus million units
Parent Company: Sony
PlayStation that was ranked at the tenth position on the list is a series of video game consoles created and developed by Sony Computer Entertainment. The brand, which was first introduced in 1994 in Japan, has dominated the fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth generations of video gaming. PlayStation 2 is the best-selling console in the series, selling a record of 150 million units as of January 2011. The company has launched its latest console, the PlayStation 3 which has sold over 63.9 million units as of March 2012. In the end of February 2012, the company latest portable console recorded a sale of 1.2 million units.
#9 Lipitor
Category: Pharmaceutical
Units sold/sales: $125 billion revenue
Parent Company: Pfizer
Lipitor, which came ninth on the list of 10 Best-selling Products of All Time compiled by 247wallst.com, is a trade name of a calcium salt (Atorvastatin) marketed by Pfizer. This drug, which is a member of the drug class known as statins, is used for lowering the level of LDL—the so called bad cholesterol—in the blood. The drug also stabilizes plaque and prevents strokes through anti-inflammatory and other mechanisms.
It was first synthesized by Bruce Roth of Parke-Davis Warner-Lambert Company (now Pfizer) in 1985. It is the best-selling drug in the pharmaceutical history and its sales generated revenue of $125 billion when it got approved for marketing by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1996. Though it was not the first in its class, its ability to reduce cholesterol and significant advertising quickly propelled it to the top of its class of drugs and it could top the list of best-selling branded pharmaceuticals in the world for nearly a decade.
#8 Toyota Corolla
Category: Vehicle
Units sold/sales: 39 million cars
Parent Company: Toyota
Toyota Corolla, which achieved the eighth position on the list is one among the line of compact cars manufactured by the Japanese auto-maker Toyota. It rapidly became popular throughout the world ever since the nameplate was first introduced in 1966. Beating the Volkwagen Beetle, it became the best-selling nameplate in the world in 1997 and as of 2012, more than 39 million Corollas have been sold. The company has also considered several design revisions as the car was breaking the sales records.
The car gets the name ‘Corolla’ as it is the tradition of Toyota to name their primary models using the name ‘Crown’; and the term ‘Corolla’ means crown in Latin.
The early models of Corolla were mostly rear-wheel drive and the later ones were front-wheel drive. The company has produced some models that were four-wheel drive. One of the major competitor of Toyota Corolla almost from the very beginning has been Nissan Sunny that was also introduced the same year.
#7 Star Wars
Category: Movies
Units sold/sales: $4.54 billion in ticket sales
Parent Company: 20th Century Fox
The seventh on the list, Star Wars is an American space opera franchise that consists of film series created by George Lucas. The film series has been adopted by various other media genres such as books, television series, computer and video games and comic books. These supplements to the film trilogies have resulted in significant development of the series and these media kept the franchise active in the interim between the film trilogies. This movie series portrays a universe which is in a galaxy that existing far away from our universe. Its Jedi is the representation of good and Sith is that of the evil and their popular weapon of choice is the lightsaber. The first film in the series was released in 1977 under the title Star Wars by 20th Century Fox, followed by two sequals, released at three-year intervals and all the three were box-office hits generating a total revenue of $4.49 billion. The success of these films led the company to re-release them in the theatres.
#6 iPad
Category: Tablet
Units sold/sales: 67 million units
Parent Company: Apple
The much accepted product from Apple, iPad is a line of tablet computers, which was designed and marketed primarily as a platform for audio-vishual media including books, periodicals, movies, music, games, apps and web content. The size and weight of the tablet fall between those of the contemporary smartphones and laptop computers. This tablet uses the operating system iOS, the same one used on Apple’s iPod Touch and iPhone and it can run its own applications and the iPhone applications. iPad has a multi-touch display like the iPod Touch and iPhone, which makes it different from most of the previous tablet computers that generally used a pressure-triggered stylus. Apple is selling iPad with Wi-Fi and cellular models, in which the Wi-Fi connection is used to access local area network and the internet and the cellular model is used to connect to mobile data networks with 3G or 4G.
#5 Mario Franchise
Category: Video game franchise
Units sold/sales: 262 million units
Parent Company: Nintendo
The Mario Franchise, which could grab the fifth position in the list of evergreen best-selling products, is a media franchise consisting of video games published and produced by Nintendo starring the fictional super hero, Mario. The franchise is active in other media including television series and films. The master brain behind Mario was originally Shigeru Miyamoto which was introduced with the video game, Donkey Kong in July 1981. Then the games were developed by a variety of developers including Nintendo, Hudson Soft and AlphaDream. The major series of the franchise is the Super Mario platform series that follows Mario’s adventures in the fictional world of the Mushroom Kingdom and these games chiefly rely on Mario’s jumping ability to allow him to progress through various levels of the game. The franchise was featured in more than 200 games of various genres, being the best-selling video game franchise of all time.
#4 Michael Jackson's ‘Thriller’
Category: Album
Units sold/sales: 110 million units
Parent Company: Epic Records
The American pop star, Michael Jackson’s Thriller is the sixth studio album is the fourth on the list. It was released in 1982 as a follow-up of Jackson’s commercially successful 1979 album ’Off the Wall’ by Epic Records. Thriller too explored the similar genres used in ‘Off the Wall’ including pop, R&B, rock, post-disco and adult contemporary music. Recording sessions of the album took place at Westearn Recording Studios in Los Angeles, California, with a production budget of $750,000. Jackson himself wrote four among the nine tracks on the album. Seven singles were released from the album, all of which reached the top 10 on theBillboard Hot 100. "Baby Be Mine" and "The Lady in My Life" were the only tracks that were not released as singles. In just few years of its release, thriller became the best-selling albums of all time and still continues to be one with sales estimated between 65 and 110 million copies worldwide till date. The album won eight Grammy Awards at the 1984 Grammys.
#3 Harry Potter
Category: Book series
Units sold/sales: 450 million units
Parent Company: Scholastic (US publisher)
Harry porter snatching the third rank in the list is a series of fantasy novels written by the British writer J K Rowling. The books tell the stories of the adventures of a wizard, Harry Potter and his friends Ronald Weasley and Hermione Granger, who are the students at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. Since the release of the first novel in the series, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in June 1997, the books have gained massive popularity among people of all ages and it also had critical acclaim and commercial success worldwide. The series got some share of criticism too, especially for having concern for the dark tone. As of June 2011, the book series has sold about 450 million copies, which made it the best-selling books series in the history and they were the fastest-selling books also. So far this series has been translated into 67 languages. The series has also made movies that could trigger similar success in the box-office.
#2 iPhone
Category: Smartphone
Units sold/sales: 250 million units
Parent Company: Apple
The much hailed smartphone from Apple, iPhone is no wonder at the top in the market leaving the contemporary brands far behind. The iPhone, designed and marketed by Apple, runs iOS mobile operating system, originally named as iPhone OS. The Late CEO of Apple, Steve Jobs unveiled the first iPhone in January 2007 and it got released on June 29, 2007. The sixth generation in the iPhone series has been announced already this year. The iPhone can work as a camera phone, a portable media player, a video camera and an internet client with email and web browsing capabilities; it can also send texts and receive visual as well as voice mails and has both Wi-Fi and cellular data connectivity. The users can have a multi-touch screen in iPhone which includes a virtual keyboard rather than a physical one. It can access to App Store which has more than 500,000 apps as of 2012.
#1 Rubik's Cube
Category: Toy
Units sold/sales: 350 million units
Parent Company: Seven Towns
The ‘Magic Cube’ is the top best-selling product in the world as of the list. Rubik’s Cube is almost a must have toy in every households having kids, though it is toy that puzzles even adults. It is a three dimensional mechanical puzzle that got invented in 1974 by the Hungarian sculptor and professor of architecture Erno Rubik. The puzzle was licensed by Rubik to be sold by Ideal Toy in 1980. The puzzle won the German Game of the Year special award for Best Puzzle of that year. As of January 2009, 350 million Magic Cubes had been sold worldwide making it the world's top-selling puzzle game. In the classic version of the Rubik's Cube, each of the six faces is covered by nine stickers, each of one of six solid colours (traditionally white, red, blue, orange, green, and yellow) and a specific mechanism enables each face to turn independently, thus mixing up the colours. For the puzzle to be solved, each face must be made having all the 9 stickers in one colour. Similar puzzles were produced later with various numbers of stickers, not all of them by Rubik.
