carson smith’s blog

More unshaven people ordering McDonalds? Online fantasies about Louis Vuitton handbags? These are just a few inferences one might take away from my rather unscientific investigation into the performance of top brand names in Google search.

I started my research with data from Millward Brown (MB), a major brand marketing consultancy. Each year, they attempt to determine the top 100 worldwide brands. Using combination of hard and soft data sources from research companies, monetary values are calculated. So are the percentage changes from the previous year. You can view the 2009 report here.

As a web marketing analyst, I was particularly interested in how the top brands performed online.  I wanted to:

• Discover which brands people are more popular in Google searches compared to last year.
• Determine any correlation with MB’s reported changes in brand value between 08 and 09.
• Interpret the data in context of the recession.

After some basic research of MB’s top 100 brands using Google Insights for Search, I came up with my own list of the biggest winners and losers over the past 12 months. A positive % means more people are typing the term into Google compared to last year. I contrasted these Google search volume changes with Millward Brown’s % changes in brand value, which are calculated using more traditional sources.

With the exception of Nissan, the only discrepancies between positive and negative % changes in the Google searches and MB data sets are the American bank brands. In some cases, this makes sense because many banks underwent mergers. Chase, for example, swallowed up Washington Mutual in 2008. Chase’s (blue) search volume saw a marked increase as WaMu (red) customers started searching for their new bank brand. The defunct WaMu brand plunged. See graph below:

Over half of the best-performing brands on Google between 08 and 09 were foreign. Again, this makes some sense considering the recession has affected domestic companies most severely.

Another interesting thing to look at are the luxury brands. Surprisingly, Louis Vuitton and GUCCI saw some of the largest increases in online interest this past year. Whether this was due to increased marketing spend or escapism from economic hardship, it’s clear people are not about to start organic farms in their back yard just yet.

Now let’s take a look at the 20 brands who saw the biggest declines in online interest between 2008 and 2009:

Here, the relationship between Google and MB data is not as strong. For example, IBM saw a 20 percent decline in search volume, yet according to MB, their brand value increased by 20%. Both data sets agree on Porsche, whose attempt to take over VW seems to have had adversely affected them. And fewer people are searching for Gillette. After all, who needs to shave when you’re unemployed?!

It is also interesting to note here that several major American banks did see declines in search volume, in accordance with MB’s brand value percentages. There are likely reasons other than brand value for these changes for the correlations.

How strong are the correlations?

To determine the relationship between Google search and MB brand value data, I plotted the percent changes in Excel and generated an R squared value. R squared is a value from -1 (perfectly negative relationship) to +1 (perfectly positive relationship). And 0 means there is no relationship at all.

In an effort to minimize anomalies attributable to factors other than brand value, I removed all the American bank brands from the data set. Below is a scatter plot showing the relationship between Google search data and MB data:

With an R squared value of 0.14, there is a weak positive correlation between two data sets. This does not definitively mean that Google search volume is an indicator of brand value, but simply suggests a minor relationship is possible. Given that MB’s data is a rough estimate of something that’s intangible (and disagrees on many points with a similar study by another agency called Interbrand), a weak correlation is to be expected.

Rather than providing answers, I hope this little study provokes some questions about the online behavior and brand value. More people than ever are searching for products and services online. Identifying changes in keyword search patterns offers insight into consumers’ interests unlike any other medium. While the relationship shown here may be small, there is no doubt companies concerned with their brand value should be paying attention to Google searches.

If not predicting the impending collapse of our economy one day, the media is forecasting terrorist attacks the next. The press loves to depress. “How ’bout ya quit makin’ things up?” asked a frustrated Sarah Palin upon resigning last week.

Harsh. How ‘bout we all cool off and step back for a sec?

What if we could zoom out and look at all this clatter and chatter in perspective? With the internet we can. Every hour of every day, Google’s non-partisan computer code aggregates all the news article published online – all around the world.

One great feature Google offers is called “Google Trends,” a visualization of keyword frequency in both search and news articles. I want to show you Google’s monthly news reference volume for two of the biggest words in news: “economy” (in blue) and “Iraq” (in red) since the beginning of 2007.

“Iraq” has been steadily decreasing for the last three years. Meanwhile, the “economy” grew slightly through mid 2008, leaping passed Iraq as the crisis hit. It grew very quickly, thousands upon thousands of new articles crawled by Google each day as the stock market tanked. You’ll notice that just before 2009, the economy took a big dip in news coverage. This is probably due to an emphasis on the election, as it quickly climbed back up after Christmas.

But the overall trend for both the economy and Iraq since October 2008 is a steady, albeit slow decline. Let me emphasize that this is not  a reflection of sentiment towards the economy or Iraq, it is simply a report of news mentions.

So when you read those fire and brimstone articles about the collapse of the economy and chaos in Iraq, take a step back and look at the overall news volume reference. If bad-news-hungry journalists are chattering about it less and less each month, maybe things are getting better?

Let’s hope so.

PS, here are Sarah Palin’s news mentions to-date: