iPhone playing candy crush
A woman poses for a photo illustration with an iPhone as she plays Candy Crush in New York February 18, 2014. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri

Apple takes the topspot as the favorite brand in emerging markets. Most of the people in the developing countries want an iPhone.

Such information came from Upstream and Ovum, marketing firm and researcher respectively. Their study about Apple has surfaced on top of Samsung Electronics, which was the favorite brand last year. Samsung got a slight decline from 32 percent to 29 percent, Upstream reported while Apple jumped from 21 percent to Samsung's spot in the previous year.

iPhone 5c

Some credits went to iPhone 5c, which was the direction of price-sensitive consumers, emerging markets included. iPhone 5c came out in September 2013 as Apple raised its marketing efforts in those countries, putting its name center and front.

While it may elevate the brand, it cannot transform into sales immediately for 5c. Most countries do not sell smartphones with discounts, as carrier contracts in the U.S. offer. iPhone is still expensive for most of the consumers in developing countries.

According to IHS Analyst Francisco Sideco, Apple will find it difficult to reach the emerging country consumers if it does not create a much cheaper iPhone. Apple's brand halo is good, but won't help the company overtake Samsung immediately because the Korean electronics giant is the largest smartphone maker in the world. Some reasons were its low-margin and cheap handsets in addition to its Galaxy products. The good angle for Apple was the emerging middle classes who may switch to iPhones when they have the money, but industrialization may take long.

Upstream Study

Upstream study this year covered 4,504 consumers in China, Brazil, Vietnam, Nigeria and India. There was a slight difference between the previous year's study and this year. Last year's asked people in Brazil, Saudi Arabia and India to disregard price. Upstream said the two studies were analogous.

Tailing Apple and Samsung are Nokia, HTC and Blackberry. HTC sees a rise for this year from the last while Nokia and BlackBerry still have lots of marketing efforts to do as the surveys show that their standing last year's rating was better than this year.