Brand (businesses with multiple locations) Pages

I’m in the process of creating a large directory and there are several businesses which have multiple locations.

I wanted to create “brand” pages for these businesses so I could provide a little more info on the brand and display each of their listings on one page.

I thought the easiest way to do this would be to create a separate category for each brand and use this as the secondary category for each of their listings.

This would work well but I don’t want the brand categories appearing in the “Popular Catgeories” box. Is there any way to hide certain categories?

Alternatively, is there a better way to achieve what I require?