The Biz of Coding

Yahoo! and Google pip Paris Hilton & Britney in Brand Wars of 2007

by Ujwal Tickoo on January 9th, 2007

CNNMoney.com has published a report which predicts that Amazon, Google, eBay, and Yahoo! – 4 Consumer Internet Brands would be amongst 2007's top 10 Brands. The report is based on a study by Landor Associates, a strategic brand and design consulting company based in San Francisco. (Landor is part of WPP, one of the world's largest global communications services companies.)

If you look at the Winner Categories in Landor's Top 10 list — 6 of 10 are Technology related : Consumer Internet and Electronics (iPods and Sony). Of the losers top 3 are hot Celebrity Brands — Paris Hilton, Nicol Richie, and Britney Spears!

The 4 key Brand trends in 2007 according to Landor's survey appear to be:

• Mass Appeal — explains the prediction for Google, Yahoo!, eBay, iPods, Amazone etc.
• Consistency — Google and iPod appeared in the 2006 drawn by Landor
• Celebrities with Substance — explains the fall of Paris Hilton, Britney and the gang….Oops they did their boring histrionics yet again!
• Failure of Social Networking sites to create a mass consumer connection — this one is a real surprise — as 2006 was the year that YouTube stormed the world and removed all doubts about Web 2.0 being the next big Tech Wave.

Brandsimple is a book written by Allen Adamson, Managing Director of Landor's NY office. Allen's blog is here.

Interestingly 2 of the Top 3 brands in 2006 emerged to be Tech Brands in a study done by Interbrand. Microsoft and IBM had taken the honors. Google had shown the highest gain on Interbrands 2006 list.

Google also topped Fortune's list of Top 100 Companies to work for in 2007. Yahoo! ranked 44th on this list. When I see Google employees walking around in T-shirts that read "I am Feeling Lucky" — I smile wrly. With a stock price predicted to hit $ 630  — man, I would feel pretty darn lucky! Whether or not Google changes the entire world's searches, my retirement finances would be well taken care of if I had those stocks lying around :)

POSTED IN: Google