You can’t buy a Google, so can you even call it a brand?
Now Screen CEO Mark Silcocks doesn't believe Google is a brand. He therefore has a problem with its first place ranking in the 2018's World's Most Valuable Brands survey.
The biggest surprise about 2018’s “World’s Most Valuable Brands” was not that Google lost the crown to Amazon, but that anyone in marketing ever thought Google was a brand.
It’s a company all right. A massive, highly successful, half a trillion dollar company (aka Alphabet, the holding company) and all credit to them – no-one could detract from Google’s phenomenal corporate success.
But a brand?
There are hundreds of different definitions and interpretations of what a brand is, but one thing’s fundamental: people generally have to be willing to hand over some of their hard-earned, cold hard cash to purchase its products or services.
That’s the whole point.
A brand is something you trust enough to buy and ideally trust so much that, in a competitive market, you’ll pay extra for this particular one. That’s what brand equity is: the value inherent in the appeal of one brand over another brand or product.
So a true brand like Kit Kat gives Nestle a net worth that is much higher than a company which just manufactures chocolate bars, because of the inherent value in the name Kit Kat: the trust consumers imbue in that brand name and their propensity to keep buying it regardless of who owns it or makes it or even if the product form changes.
Brand Finance, the “strategic consultancy” which conducted the “World’s Most Valuable Brands” survey, admits as much by basing their rankings on an estimate of the “economic benefit the company owner would achieve by licensing its brand.”
But you can’t buy a Google. You can’t touch it. There’s no-one to talk to. There’s no tangible product, certainly none that’s stood the test of time against serious competition. There were the glasses, but they flopped. There’s the car, but that tends to be more experimental than marketable – Google might develop some software, but it’ll probably end up in someone else’s car, just like most Chromebooks are badged with other brand names.
Google phones. Does anyone actually own one? (The best guestimate [Google doesn’t reveal numbers], is that it took eight months to sell between 1-2m Pixels; and according to Forbes, 1 million iPhones are sold every day.) Google Home – grabbing some early adopters, but under threat from Amazon’s Alexa or much more trusted hardware brands like Sonos or Apple HomePod. Google Maps? Just another freebie.
And therein lies the rub, and it’s the same fault line that continually rocks the very foundations of the internet itself: so much of it is free. If you don’t pay for something, you never really value it. Trying to make people value something that has always been free is very, very hard, as legacy media moguls are discovering in the digital age.
Google’s more like air. It’s just there. Things work because of it. But if everything worked just as well without it, you wouldn’t miss it.
Do its advertisers prove Google is something people will pay for? Not really. It’s a listings service, not a brand.
No different to that other great money-spinner before it, Yellow Pages, and just as replaceable. In 2005, Yellow Pages publisher Sensis was worth $12 billion. By 2014 it was bought for the equivalent of $648 million. Today you’d be hard pressed to “license” the Yellow Pages “brand” for anything.
The other key quality of a brand is it’s something that inspires loyalty in its consumers. It’s a badge of honour which people will defend and even stand by when things get tough. We know brands are made by companies, but whether it’s a corporate brand like Cadbury or a product brand like M&M’s, brands take on mythical qualities that transcend the corporations and the people who run them.
From New York to London, M&M’s World continues to draw in visitors from around the globe
Witness Perrier containing benzene, which actually poisoned people back in 1990 and, more recently, VW cheating diesel emissions tests. Each time consumers found it in their hearts to excuse those brands, both of which continued to thrive.
Where’s that loyalty towards Google? As its founders were once the first to admit, they are one click away from disappearing altogether if a smarter, faster more accurate search engine came along.
How can we be so sure? Because not long ago, Yahoo was similarly pervasive and all it took was one click for them to all but disappear too.
So no, I’m not so sure Google is a proven brand yet, certainly not in the way a brand like Virgin can apply its DNA to a myriad of white label products and services and instantly increase their value. Or a brand like Lego, which has stood the test of time in a highly competitive, continually shifting market, and is still able to charge a huge premium for what are essentially little bits of plastic.
Of course, Google’s high-achieving founders, owners or employees, seem more focused on data collection and growing ad revenue than selling products anyway.
It is, however, symptomatic of the confusion around what a brand truly is, that we proclaimed Google the most valuable brand before anyone thought to ask if it even was one.
Mark Silcocks is CEO of Now Screen.
Google might not be a brand to you, but as an IT professional it’s no diffrent to me than microsoft or apple. You can’t buy “microsoft” – you buy windows or office.
like this you might not be able to buy “google” but you can buy a google home – as well as on premises search and google apps for your domain.
this comes across as a whinge from someone who has no idea about how the digital ecconomy works
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It’s becoming apparent that articles on the Net have hit peak stupid.
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IMHO your argument has a serious and fundamental flaw: your definition of a ‘brand’.
‘Brand’ defines the relationship between potential customers (usually people) and potential providers (usually but not always companies).
Given the strength of the relationship between people and Google (Microsoft Bing, anyone?), I’d argue Google deserves its place at number one.
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“…but that anyone in marketing ever thought Google was a brand”
Can’t possibly be serious?
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What a shocker of an op-ed.
Here’s a list of Google Products to the hapless chap who wrote this – https://www.google.com.au/about/products/ Many of these are products are healthy revenue earners. There’s also a number of businesses that have their entire organisation on Google Apps, who once used Microsoft Office.
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Not to mention the tremendously valuable amount of data we share in every transaction with the Google search engine.
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These ideas are so outdated it scares me. Get UP, Channel Nine, and the Olympics are not a brand but Intel is; even though you make an active choice for the aforementioned and at best a passive choice for the latter?
The lack of understanding of how consumers behave demonstrated in the article is poor reflection on our industry.
It is great to question how brands are valued but I’d love to see Mark’s empirical results on how brand “Love” has ever translated to a positive ROI.
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I bought my Nexus and Pixel Google phones (which came with a Google VR Headset) from the Google store. I buy Music, TV, Movies, Apps through Google. I have a Google Chromebook laptop. I have a Google Chromecast to get Netflix and other streaming services on my old bedroom TV. I might get a Google Home one day.
I pay for Google Drive cloud storage.
Research? You should have tried Google!
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Oh dear, this one deserves a #facepalm. People may not hand over their ‘cold hard cash’ to use Google, but there is a value exchange and benefits.
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Now screen says ‘they’re not here to make wallpaper’ but they certainly write it…
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You can’t buy a google, but you can invest in it by buying shares. You can’t hand over cash in a transaction to obtain a Google product, but you can obtain a Google product through a transaction in exchange for your time, attention and action (so it’s still an investment).
If Google isn’t a brand then any free software is not a brand. I just don’t see how that makes sense.
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Sorry but this is so silly. You can’t buy Google??? 1000’s of people buy google adwords everyday. And they pay a lot for it. The fact that it’s business model is B2B doesn’t stop it being a brand.
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A ‘Brand’ is the outward manifest representation of a known and understood relationship between entities. The keyword here is ‘representation’ – Google it (such irony!)
As an individual, you may know what a ‘brand’ ‘represents’ – or not know what it represents – similarly you may ‘trust’ that the representation is accurate, or you do not trust the representation as accurate.
In all scenarios there is a ‘brand’ – where you both know and trust a brand – then by extension, it is a ‘valuable’ brand to you.
There is absolutely no scenario where the ‘Brand’ of Google is not both known & trusted by hundreds of millions of people around the world. So Google absolutely should hold a rank in the top 5 most valuable Brands.
What is more interesting, is that it has been toppled by Amazon. How and why that happened would be a better conversation.
Suspect that Google has incurred a decline in the trust metric of the valuation assessment – because it is unlikely that Amazon has quite the same share of mind as Google but very likely a notably higher trust metric.
suggest this reporter school-up on some 101 brand marketing before writing click-bait nonsense
oh wait.. that was probably the point (click-bait controversy)
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This article made me facepalm.
Mumbrella has taken a decline publishing this article
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Huh?
So if a company’s products or services are free to use (which most of Google’s consumer-facing services are – search, Chrome, gmail, calendar, etc etc), it’s not a brand? Really?
People are loyal to Google. I don’t use any other search engine, I download Chrome whenever I get a new computer….
Of course if someone comes along and does these things better, they may lose their share, but that applies to any brand (even the ones you pay for…)
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‘You can’t buy a Google’. I own a Google phone, I pay for G Suite, I purchased a Google Home speaker.
What is the author going on about? Hardware and software products are and will continue to be a MASSIVE part of Google’s business…
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Well this piece is certainly garnering some engagement! In my opinion, Google is a brand and yes, as mentioned in this article, you can buy “a Google” in its suite of products both physical, software and in ads. Google is set to make over $70billion in ad revenue alone this year. It’s a brand. Perhaps the definition of a brand in one’s piece needs to be re-imagined for 2018 and beyond.
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Thanks for all the feedback. I think it’s a debate worth having because, in a world dominated by a few corporate monopolies bigger than countries, it’s easy to be distracted by dizzying market caps.
I’m well aware of Google’s impressive and growing list of products and services, but that’s kind of the point. It’s almost as if they’re commoditised: they’re either free, the default, or else, like Pixel, far from number one in their respective categories.
If the AdWord cash cow funding everything else could dry up overnight (in Larry Page’s words: “competition is one click away”) and if it takes several months to sell as many phones as your competitor sells every day, then one really has to question whether that is the marque of a true brand, how desired it really is and what value the name is really adding.
Kit Kat is not one chocolate bar away from being usurped as the perfect break; VW is not one vehicle launch, nor even a public disgrace, away from being the leading car brand; Virgin and Nike imbue (almost) everything they touch with an instantly identifiable positioning, personality and justifiable premium.
Happy to be proved wrong, but with my daughter already wanting to exchange the Google Home we only just got for Christmas for the new Apple HomePod, I’m not sure how soon that will be!
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Android (Google) has long outsold and been more ‘popular’ than the iOs (Apple iPhone). I can’t believe I am having to use those brackets.
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The stupidest article I’ve read so far this year.
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Google has a clear positioning in search – it’s a brand. In fact they understood its positioning and personality so well that when things were becoming a bit muddy they restructured under Alphabet.
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So the original article wasn’t ridiculous enough, now you’re doubling down!?
Pixel is just Googles attempt at designing both hardware AND software. According to IDC, there were 344.3 million smartphones sold in Q1 of 2017, and 85% of those were running Android. Every previous qtr throughout 2016 had the same margin.
Basing your statements on your daughters desire to swap a Google Home for a Homepod is really the icing on this mind-numbing article. (And by all accounts the homepod has decent sound, but is lagging behind Google and Alexa in everything else.)
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