14 DAY TRIAL // When your company's name becomes a verb you know you've made it. There's hardly a brand more popular than Google's and now we have the numbers to prove it. According to Millward Brown Optimor, who releases the well-known BrandZ Top 100, Google is now the most valuable brand name in the world by a comfortable margin, at $100 billion. The Mountain View company overtakes rival Microsoft, who goes on to take the second place, but also mainstream brands like Coca-Cola or MacDonalds.
“Five of the top 10 in the BrandZ Top 100 are technology brands. The rapid ascent of these brands and their high values reflect the strength and velocity of the technology category, which grew by 2 percent last year,” the report reads [PDF]. “The rising popularity of online search advertising, which is cheaper than display, is benefiting Google which owns 73 percent market share in this area.”
With a brand value of $100 billion, the search company is the clear winner but the second place goes to another tech giant, as the authors value the Microsoft brand at $76 billion. Coca-Cola, one of the most recognizable brands in the world for decades, comes in third, with a value of $67 billion, followed by enterprise giant IBM with $66 billion, MacDonalds also with $66 billion and Apple with an estimated value of $63 billion.
One interesting aspect of this is the difference between the two companies at the top when it comes to marketing and advertising. While Google does have big ad campaigns online and sometimes in traditional media as well, like the recent billboards the company set up to advertise Google Apps, it's impressive to see a company that still relies mostly on word of mouth become the most valuable brand in the world.
This, while Microsoft spends tens of millions of dollars advertising its new rebranded search engine alone. Also interesting is the difference in the value of the companies themselves, with Google having a market capitalization of $142 billion, hardly a small company, while Microsoft has a market cap of $212 billion.
Still, the Redmond giant does market a lot more brands – Windows, Office, Bing, Xbox, Zune etc. – and for the most part keeps them separate. Google on the other hand has very few standalone brands – Gmail, Picasa, Blogger or YouTube – and many of those were actually acquired by the company. YouTube, for example, got its name way before Google bought it and the company's first venture in video sharing was called, what else, Google Video. This is true for many of its products as most of the time it just sticks its name to a common word and is done with it; i.e. Google Maps, Google Docs, Google News, Google Reader and so on.