Top 100 brands, their online value and what Reicheld's got to do with it
A few weeks ago Business week published Interbrands top 100 most valuable brands of 2006. In this ranking Coca-Cola topped the ranking, before Microsoft, IBM and GE. Intel closed the top-5. The value of these brands is measured through how likely it is they will earn more in the future.
Futurelab looked at this ranking and applied a new calculation on it. They calculated the online relevance of these top-100 brands, based on following smart criteria:
- the number times a brand is mentioned in Google
- the number of times a brand is mentioned in Baidu
- the number of Technorati blogposts about the brand
- the number of links to the brand’s dot-com (.com) website (URL Trends)
- the google pagerank for the brand’s dot-com (.com) website
- the relative reach of the brand’s website (as per Alexa ranking)
- the number of times the wording “I love (brand)” and “(brand) is great” appeared in Google
- the number of times the wording “I hate (brand)” and “(brand) sucks” appeared in Google (in spite of its crudeness, this word has substantial statistical significance within a US context).
This resulted in a completely different ranking. At first sight, this is very obvious, because some very valuable brands don't resonate that much with consumers (e.g. LG or Intel or IBM). But what fascinates me is that the brands that top the Futurelab ranking, are the brands that had the biggest growth in the Interbrand ranking. If we look at the top five of the online brands and compare it with their growth in the Interbrand ranking:
- Google: +46% (ranked 24th)
- eBay: +18% (ranked 47th)
- Apple: +14% (ranked 39th)
- Disney: +5% (ranked 5th)
- Nokia: +14% (ranked 6th)
This is quite convincing evidence for the importance of Reicheld's Net Promotor Score: the degree to which people are willing to talk positive about a brand. The metrics that Futurelab is using are heavily oriented towards linking, blogging, commenting. The top brands are the ones that are the most likely to turn up in online conversations and therefore top the Google rankings, the Baidu rankings, the Technorati rankings, etc... The Net Promoter Score states that the more a brand is talked about positively, the more this brand's revenue growth will increase.
Quod erat demonstrandum.
Top 100 brands of 2006: BusinessWeek/Interbrand
Top-100 online brands of 2006 by Futurelab
Comments
Well spotted !! We are smelling something too, yet refrained from talking about it at this point as we'd probably need to wait for the next Interbrand list to see if there is some real predictive value(i.e. if there is, next time round someone like LG should make a jump in the interbrand list).
BTW, didn't know you guys were Reicheldians too ;-) ... we should go for a beer on the Oude Markt some day.
hey Alain,
We are hardcore Reicheldians from the very beginning. i-merge actually did a research with the KULeuven on the impact of e-zines on brand evangelism. You can download the paper here (pdf).
The i-merge vision on interactive marketing is all about how a brand create customer evangelism and advocacy.
Pick your date, I'd love to have a chat in leuven. :-)
Grtz,
Tom
NPS is definitely instrumental in changing the focus of marketeers from transactional ( tell & sell) to conversational. recent debate going on in the US with P&G as the protagonist.One article to get the feet back on the ground.
http://adage.com/article?article_id=115342
any suggestions for forum/blogs where users of NPS exchange the "weird" results when applied on productlevel ?
Phil