Ubiquitous Google is Top Brand
April 23 2007
A week of headlines for Google. On Friday the search giant announced first quarter revenue up 63% to $3.66bn, and rocketed to the top of Millward Brown's BRANDZ™ index with a worth dwarfing current figures - $66.4bn. Google also made headline deals and gained search share against rivals Yahoo! and Microsoft.
Friday's financial results showed continued growth for Google's core search and advertising business, although net income was stable at around $1.0 billion ($1.03bn in Q1 2006).
The second of Millward Brown's annual BRANDZ™ Top 100 Most Powerful Brands rankings saw Google jumping into first place with General Electric ($61.9bn), Microsoft ($55.0bn) and Coca-Cola ($44.1bn) following.
Produced by Millward Brown Optimor, the global research agency's finance and ROI arm, the ranking identifies the most powerful brands in the world as measured by their dollar value. The aggregate value of all the top 100 brands rose 10.6% in one year, from $1.44 trillion to $1.6 trillion in 2007.
Google's 77% rise in value is the biggest of any company in the top 50, although Marks & Spencer, entering at no.68, leads the Top 100 for percentage growth with a massive 192%.
Global CEO Joanna Seddon says the winning brands 'leverage major market trends effectively to create business value' and are flexible in entering new areas of opprtunity in response to market changes. Notable changes singled out by the company include:
- the rise of the East, with the huge consumer markets of Russia, China, India and (sic) Brazil pushing brand managers to make their products relevant to local consumers – success stories include KFC ($4.5bn), McDonald's ($33.1bn), Nike ($10.3bn), Louis Vuitton ($22.7bn) and Rolex ($5.4bn).
- Converging technologies - voice, data, GPS, music, Internet, email etc – and devices, with branding leveraged to simplify and contrast different offerings like the iPhone from Apple ($24.8bn) or all-in-one mobile computers from Nokia ($31.7bn)
- Corporate Social Responsibility, with perceived delivery on promises from BP ($5.9bn), Shell ($ 4.7bn) and Toyota ($ 33.4bn).
BRANDZ™ combines financials with solid measures of consumer sentiment derived from parent company WPP's brand equity database and interviews with more than one million consumers globally. Market performance metrics and financial data are obtained from Datamonitor and Bloomberg respectively.
The complete report with category and regional breakdowns plus additional analysis is available at
www.millwardbrown.com/Sites/optimor/Content/KnowledgeCenter/BrandzRanking2007.aspx
Figures from
Hitwise, comScore and NetRatings all agree that
Google's domination of search continues to strengthen steadily – although huge differences in the reported figures reflect the problems currently being addressed by the IAB (
www.mrweb.com/drno/news6703.htm ).
Hitwise' April 11th figures claim that Google accounted for 64% of all US searches for the four weeks ending March 31st, with Yahoo! Search, MSN Search and Ask.com receiving 22%, 9% and 3% respectively.
www.hitwise.com .
Today (April 23rd) Nielsen//NetRatings release US search share rankings for March, showing Google with 3.8 billion searches and 53.7% of the market (year on year volume growth 31.6%). Yahoo! Search has 21.8% share (16.6% volume growth), MSN / Windows Live Search 10.1% (11.4%) and AOL 5.8% (8.1%). Ask.com 1.8% and My Web Search 1.0 are the only others with more than half a percent of the market. (Source: Nielsen//NetRatings MegaView Search, April 2007 – online at
www.nielsen-netratings.com ).
comScore's monthly qSearch analysis for the same month suggests that Americans conducted 7.3 billion searches online in March, up 6% from the previous month and 14% versus March 2006. Google Sites captured 48.3%, up 0.2% on the previous month, with Yahoo! sites second on 27.5% and followed Microsoft Sites (10.9%), Ask Network (5.2%) and Time Warner Network (5.0%). (
www.comscore.com ).
Figures released last week by eMarketer suggest that Google and Yahoo will garner 75.5% and 16.3% respectively of the $8.29bn US paid search advertising market in 2007. (
www.emarketer.com ).
Yahoo! by contrast is said to have disappointed analysts with last Tuesday's first quarter results, profits falling 11% to $142m. Yahoo! has been forming its own alliances to counter the threat of Google but the latter stole the dealmaking headlines with the $3.1 billion acquisition of online ad broker DoubleClick and a radio ad deal with Clear Channel Communications to add to earlier satellite and newspaper deals.
All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.
