The world's most cost-effective brand

Last week's termination of Froogle, one of Google's most unfortunate brands, prompted cackles from marketing sophisticates. The rubes at the Googleplex really ought to hire some professionals, wrote Owen Thomas of Business 2.0. Not so fast: a study of name recognition and reputation, by Millward Brown Optimor, concludes that Google is now the world's most valuable brand, worth more than $66bn. For the chart, here, we cross-referenced the top brands against their US marketing spend, as measured by Advertising Age. Mountain View achieved its position with a minute fraction of the marketing spending of other tech companies such as Microsoft and IBM. If that's marketing naivete, can I have some please?

10:06 AM on Mon Apr 23 2007
By Nick Denton
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ahaislip at 10:17 AM on 04/23/07
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Nice numeric analysis.
nopressureman at 02:48 PM on 04/23/07
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Interesting bit of work.

I find the MBO work a little scary. From the study:

"The ranking is based on the brand's 'dollar value', calculated by using an economic use approach; the brand value shown in our ranking is based on the present value of the earnings that the brand is expected to generate in the future."

So they are using NPV earnings analysis to determine brand value. Couple that with Goog's BV shooting up 77% last year alone I find the ranking method a little suspect.

But what do you expect from a company that spells brands with a z.
TomKlein at 02:50 PM on 04/23/07
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This is something of a specious chart as it takes an accountant's view of "marketing" which is often synonymous with media or ad spending. This is then converted into the "Google spends nothing on marketing" canard.

Might I refer you to the very basic - Marketing is the 4 P's - price, place, product, promotion.

I would venture that Google is spending a LOT of money in each of these areas - trying to figure out how to make the right decisions. What is the difference betweeen CPC and CPA when it comes to the price of the ad?

Place in this instance refers to distribution. How much do you think Google has paid over the past year in distribution deals - I do recall a little distribution deal with AOL for a few nickels. They threw in some "funny money" AOL equity for good measure.

How much bandwidth and effort is being used or contemplated to just cross-promote - say, if you like our search ads, then you'll love our display ads (oh, well, as soon as the DoubleClick deal closes).

Finally, product. Do you think the product managers are putting in some time thinking about how they should configure the product / service to ensure the greatest usage?

Let's not perpetuate this myth of a company this size not spending anything on marketing. The real story here is that the accounting definition of marketing is worthless - as the dollars are usually all wrapped up in salaries spread throughout SG&A.
andrewjscott at 02:09 AM on 04/26/07
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Could'nt agree more with TomKlein. While Google doesn't go around grabbing all pagers in Time Magazine or Flight International and other vertical press such as GE or IBM might, they GIVE AWAY bandwidth, products and services FREE.

The occasionally cute girls that occasionally grace my favourite London bars with free Vodka shots, are surely engaged in marketing and brand promotion are they not?

Every time I hit maps.google.com (which will hopefully be less now I've got my Nokia N95 :-) I'm being indoctrinated further.

If some one has got some figures I'd love to see all those consumer facing free Google services wrapped into the chart and then see how they compare on a more level playing field ...