How much is your brand worth?
Last week the Millward Brown Optimor’s BrandZ Top 100 list was published. This is a list of the world’s biggest brands, and their associated ‘value’.
This year the list is topped for the third year running by Google, whose brand worth has gone up a whopping 16% over the last 12 months. This means that it is now ‘worth’ $100 billion.
As to how this value is calculated, Millward Brown Optimor (MBO) say that it is the sum of all future earnings that brand is forecast to generate, discounted to what that value is today. Some have suggested that a brand’s ‘value’ is arbitrary; for MBO, it’s all about a brand’s ability to ‘generate demand’.
One reason that Google’s brand may be so much higher than its fellow technology companies is that it always calls its products ‘Google’. This contrasts with Microsoft who run many secondary brands such as Hotmail, Windows, and Bing.
Microsoft attracts the second highest valuation, at $76.2bn (up 8 % on last year).
Others in the top 10 include Coca-Cola, IBM, McDonald’s, Apple, China Mobile, General Electric, Vodafone and Marlboro.
The two fastest growing brands were Amazon (up 85 % to $21bn) and Blackberry (up 100% to $16bn).
Despite the economic downturn, the total value of the most valuable brands rose by 2 % to just less than $2 trillion.
So what does ‘brand’ mean?
The word ‘brand’ means many different things to different people. For me, it’s what thoughts and associations people have when they think of your company. Do they think ‘good service, nice people’; or do they think ‘cheap products, fast delivery’. Do these thoughts and associations mean that people will pre-decide to buy from you before buying from your competitor? Apart from your products, ‘brand’ is what your website visitors and customers take away with them, in their minds, having visited your website or bought your products.
So how do you improve your brand’s value?
There are two ways to do this. The first is to make you customers and website visitors have as positive an experience as possible with you, your website, and your products. That might be by having a rich, well designed site; it might be by giving them easy to find information, great service, and a good feeling from their interaction with your website and your business.
The second way is to expose this ‘experience’ to as many people as you can. When it comes to building a website, that means getting as much traffic as possible to your website.
The first obvious was to do this is to work on your Search Engine Optimisation so that you can boost your website up the Search Engine Results page. Secondly, you need to make use of the Social Networking features available within WebEden to start building a community around your website. It’s this community who will recommend your site to others, and ultimately build a loyal base of frequent visitors.
Do any of you have a brand that you think is of value? What value do you think it has? Have you got any brand building tips you could leave for us here? Leave us a comment below.