Google outranks all the other brands in this year’s BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Global Brands ranking by both value and search volume, but the upstart Facebook one-ups Google it when it comes to overall search volume. New to BrandZ this year and the twentieth-most-valuable technology brand (though not on the overall Top 100 list), Facebook is the subject of three times more searches than Google.
While I find it amazing that so many people type “Facebook login” into the Google search box, it is indicative of the strength of Google’s brand that they do so. People know Google will find them what they need, even if it is only the url for their favorite social network. But does this suggest that search volume might be a good surrogate for some measures of brand equity?
Given the launch of the 2010 BrandZ Top 100 Most Valuable Brands Ranking, I decided to see whether there was any relationship between overall brand value (or its constituent parts) and the volume of searches conducted over the last year, as measured by Google Insights for Search. Here are some of my findings.
Google’s Insights for Search (GIFS) normalizes all data to the highest search data point for a given query, so in order to get some idea of relativities, I used Google itself as my benchmark and searched across all query categories for the last year. I observed two things. First, few brands achieved anywhere near the same volume of search as Google and Facebook. Second, search volume is not directly related to brand value or to brand-related measures like brand contribution or brand momentum.
Consumer technology brands do reasonably well in terms of search volume, but (as I just said) not in strict relation to their brand values. Though Apple and Microsoft placed among the Top 10 Most Valuable Brands, their search volumes are only just over one-tenth of Google’s. Nokia, HP, Sony, and Samsung were actually searched for more often than Apple and Microsoft in spite of their lower value. (Please note: These queries used only the company name. Results do differ if product names are also included.)
As the Facebook finding suggests, search is much better at telling you what is hot than what is valuable. Interest in the category, global relevance, and newsworthiness all play a part in how many people search on a brand name. (And before you ask—no, Twitter does not even come close to Facebook, Google, or even MySpace in terms of search volume.)
With this in mind, I decided to pick a less newsworthy product category to see what category-specific equity measures might drive search volumes. With Coca-Cola ranked fifth in the Top 100, I decided to focus on the 10 most valuable soft drinks.
Perhaps because it is a widely consumed category with several global brands, search volume for soft drinks does correlate with brand value—the correlation is 0.81 percent. Diet Coke gets less search volume than you might expect based on its valuation, while Red Bull gets somewhat more (almost the same volume as Pepsi). I dug a bit deeper, looking for specific brand equity measures that correlate with search volume, and came across unaided awareness. In this category at least, it matters what brand you think of first. The correlation between the search volume index and unaided first mentions is 0.83 percent. Since ubiquity is a big factor in soft drink brand success, this makes sense and tends to support the idea that search is a response to strong brand equity.
However, in this regard, the soft drinks category is a relatively unusual one. A similar analysis conducted for cars found a far lower correlation between search volume and value and that having a perceived advantage over the competition was more strongly related to search than unaided awareness. This finding suggests that in a higher involvement category, there needs to be some compelling reason for why people are willing to take the time and effort to search for your brand.
These findings are by no means definitive, but they do suggest a parallel between the digital and physical domains. In the physical realm, one of the strongest indicators of brand strength is when people ask for it by name. The digital equivalent is searching for it by name. Many other factors combine to determine how that strength translates into brand value, but it has to be a good start if someone is willing to type your brand’s name into a search engine.
Thoughts anyone?
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