Basically, it’s a way of allowing IE users to access some Google technologies that Explorer doesn’t support. TechCrunch says:
Yes, it’s both hilarious and awesome (or hilariously awesome, if you will) that Google seems to dislike IE so much that it has spent its own time improving it. Google claims its goals are noble. Talking to Group Product Manager Mike Smith and Software Engineer Alex Russell, they tell us that they simply want to make a more seamless web experience for both web users and developers.
Is that the sound of (somewhat) evil genius laughter I hear in the distance?
This hip young Google engineer couldn’t possibly be the face of evil could he? Look again at his shirt. Is that a giant mutated monster about to gobble up a helpless little browser… er… victim?
10 Reasons you should care about the
Best Global Brands 2009 list
1) These are the game-changing brands
Just a quick glance at the top ten from 2008 should be enough to show any brand manager that this is a list you a) want to be on eventually, b) need to be at least be aware of and understand the strategies of, and c) need to study, because like it or not, these brands are the rule-makers, breakers, and game changers in the world of branding.
For me, if I’m delivering a presentation or seminar, these are easily the list of examples I always choose from to make any point about branding – not because they do everything right (see my New Coke post and stay tuned for an upcoming pan of Intel), but because they are a common point of reference for most humans on earth.
2) These brands are global
And why are these brands becoming a common language around the globe? Well, the Global 100 ranking system only tracks brands that cross international borders – where more than 1/3 of their revenues come from outside a single country.
This leaves out big brands like many of the Mars chocolate products because they do most of their business in the USA. But it means that the brands that do make the list are much more likely to be household names in most Western countries.
3) The ranking distinguishes between brand & company value
This is where things get a bit tricky, but it’s one of the things that make this ranking important – and different – from most business lists. You’ll notice that the list includes brands that are companies – like Nokia or Google – as well as brands that are the product of parent companies that don’t make the list – like KFC (Yumm brands) or Blackberry (by Reaserch in Motion).
This makes the list a bit messy, like comparing Orange (which didn’t make the list) to Apple (which climbed 9 spots in 2008). But it’s a measure of the brands we consumers have in our heads, not the accident of corporate ownership which changes over time.
4) The ranking measures brand equity
Ultimately, the Global 100 ranking is pursuing the holy grail of brand management, which is measuring brand equity. In financial terms, this is the intangible – but considerable – value of the brands themselves to their owners. In brand strategy terms, brand equity is a measure of the strength of the relationships between brands and their customers.
The three areas they try to capture are the three “tangible” impacts of a good brand: a) the brand’s ability to command higher prices than un-branded alternatives, b) the value of brands to assist people in making purchase decisions, and c) the power of the brand to predicatbly influence future sales through loyalty.
5) It’s not perfect, but it’s the best we’ve got
Okay, I admit that there’s a lot of “special sauce” that goes into these rankings. Any time you are measuring intangible value, there is going to be some fudging.
In his book Branding only Works on cattle (free chapter online here), Jonathon Salem Baskin slams the Interbrand evaluation criteria:
All these assessment and rates are qualitative estimates. This isn?t math, it is religious scripture, created to reaffirm belief to the flock while ginning up enough obfuscation to dissuade nonbelievers.
Ouch. I have my own problems with and suspicions about the Interbrand methodology (E.g. the fact that Thomson Reuters vaulted into the rankings shortly after an Interbrand-led rebranding), but unlike Baskin, I’ll go with the rankings – not because they’re gospel, but because they capture the essence of something important that no one else has measured any better.
6) The world has changed
And this year, above all others, it will be fascinating to see how the rankings move after the great financial meltdown, the Obama factor, bail-outs, shrinkages in consumer spending, etc. Who’s moving up? Who’s moving down? Enquiring branders want to know.
7) Great Brands brand countries
And as I pointed out again in Swiss Secrets a few weeks ago, brands and countries have a symbiotic relationship. Who can look at any of these brands (right) without thinking of their countries of origin. IKEA is to Sweden as Verdana is to Microsoft… er wait.
8 ) Suspense: Will the US majority fall?
The US will again dominate the rankings as it had 52 brands in the top 100 last year. But after the melt-down, it wouldn’t take much to knock it off its 50+ pedestal. The rest of us wait with eager anticipation.
9) Suspense: Will Canada maintain or build its share?
We had our first two brands ever in the top 100 last year – Blackberry and Thomson Reuters. So will any more iconic Canadian brands join them on the list? The big Canadian banks all survived the melt-down with no bail-outs required, and TD and Royal Banks have started making inroads into the US market – as has newly repatriated Tim Hortons. But will any of them launch into the Top 100 limelight? I suspect not, but then, I may just be an overly modest Canadian.
10) Suspense:Have the “emerging economies” arrived yet?
The biggest question to watch this year and in the decade to come is this: how quickly can the currently unrepresented powers like China, Russia, India establish a foothold and begin to build global brands?
They have already surpassed most Western countries in population and manufacturing and are catching up quickly in many other areas. But as yet there are no really big brands from these countries. That will change (see Enter China’s Consumers), but it remains to be seen when it will begin to shake up the brandscape as we know it. Perhaps we’ll get a hint on September 21.
I, for one, can’t wait.
If you’re an eager branding beaver as well, you can sign up here and Interbrand promises to “send you all the information as it goes live.”
YouTube message from Interbrand CEO Jez Frampton
Warning: it’s a bit of a yawn – with surprisingly low production values for Interbrand. I can get away with handy-cam rants, but surely the big guy could have rented a studio, and maybe dropped a few more substantive hints? Perhaps that’s why he had only 300 views as of this morning – even though it’s auto-running from the Top Global Brands Web Page.
This happens to me a few times every week: I’m standing at a store or restaurant, this web getting customer service by phone, information pills or buying something online, and suddenly I’m faced with a dazzling, badly organized array of choices like this menu board at an Ottawa area Dairy Queen Brazier (no comment on that name for today). And how does it feel? Well, imagine shoving a whole Chocolate Chip Cookie Dough Blizzard down your throat all at once…
The THARN Effect: for me, this DQ board was a Brain-Buster Parfait
Basically, I had walked through the door having already made a number of choices: first I’d chosen between a dozen different food establishments in that neighbourhood; then I’d to choose to ignore my guilt about going with fast food at all; then I chose between ice cream – the product I normally associate with Dairy Queen – and hot food; and finally I had to choose whether to wait when I saw a significant lunch-rush line at the counter.
So by the time I got to the counter, after passing up several opportunities to walk away, you’d think DQ would try to make my life easier. But no, once I got inside the store, I faced a wall of giant posters with exclamation marks and starbursts all over them, and the menu board above that utterly failed to line up my choices in a clear way, filled with cleverly-named products that were all yelling, dancing, and fighting for my attention like a room-full of sugar-buzzed preschoolers whose Ritalin had run out.
Choice: the hidden “THARN”
Richard Adams, in his classic novel Watership Down, coined a great rabbit-language word that I like to use to describe the consumer’s mind-state when faced with too much choice:
THARN: (adj) the helpless, catatonic state a rabbit enters when it is caught in the headlights of a car.
Humans react the same way when you throw too many choices at them: they go “tharn”. Sounds a lot like the headache most people get when they swallow too much ice cream doesn’t it? Like ice cream, small, measured bites are a heavenly experience; too much too fast is physically painful.
But bright headlights & ice cream sundaes are good aren’t they?
Now, you may say, “but that’s just effective consumer marketing”, and perhaps the marketing sages at DQ know something I don’t about what sells sandwiches. Plus, as a 40-year old male, I suspect I’m not at the heart of their target demographic.
I also don’t want to imply that choice is bad, nor is it a bad thing to get your customers to slow down a bit and pay more attention to you while you have their attention.
But remember all the other choices they had to make to get to your “counter”: it’s a delicate balance between deepening their understanding by showing them more and overwhelming them with too much choice.
So ask yourself:
1) Are you helping customers quickly scan their options by organizing clear “decision trees” of plainly labelled and named options?
2) Are you making them feel confident about your brand – that is, their their end-to-end experience of it , and not just the individual sandwich they buy?
3) Are your marketing tactics really deepening their understanding, or just adding to the wall of noise they already face and defeating the point of marketing (to help people decide to buy your products)?
4) Are you managing your whole brand including your product portfolio, your decision-making interfaces, and your customer service to remove THARN moments or are you just turning on the high beams and shoving the ice cream down their throats?
The choice is yours. Well, actually, it’s theirs. And that’s the real point isn’t it?
On the topic of choosing spokespersons for your brand wisely, pill here’s a photo of a poster in the window of a bank in Italy – sent today by our own Lauren Hughes. It made me laugh hard.
Spotted in a bank window in Italy by intrepid Beg to Differ reporter Lauren Hughes
Of course, in North America, Homer has shilled for Mastercard as well – as in the You Tube video of a 2004 Super Bowl commercial below (with one of the weaker voice-overs ever in a Super Bowl ad). But to me, there’s a difference between the ad, in which Homer is able to be his bumbling, irresponsible self and still get the point across, and having his portly face on my credit card.
I’m trying to imagine pulling MC Homer out at the desk of a five-star hotel. “Uh gosh sir, do you have anything else?” Doh!
Aquisto: 2 Euros;
Mini rate: 25 Euros;
Homer’s brand equity on your credit rating: Priceless
Any wonder Flanders uses the other card?
Homer Simpson shows his credentials as a reponsible credit consumer.
Yesterday, in five more brand strategy lessons from the Princess Bride I used New Coke as an example of how customer research can occasionally lead branders astray. But thinking about it, two things struck me: First, that April 23, 2010 will be 25 years since the launch of New Coke. Second, I turn forty tomorrow, so that spring day in 1985 was when my fifteen-year-old self realized for the first time:
Brand strategy isn’t a cold, abstract business decision made by far-away executives. It’s personal! THEY WERE MESSING WITH MY COKE!!
Ah the good old days – when a company could just change its brand without fear of consumer backlash…
A brief history of New Coke
For those of you who were too young in 1985 to remember – or maybe you were bricked up into the walls of a desert hermitage during the 1980’s – and who can blame you really? – here’s a brief blow-by-blow of events around this seminal consumer branding event.
Pre-history to present – Coca-Cola launches, and retains market leadership, in the soft drink market. Fortunes are built on dark, bubbly sugar water.
1975 – Pepsi launches the Pepsi Challenge – a campaign of blind taste tests in which consumers really did choose Pepsi over Coke for the most part.
1975-1985 – Coke market dominance gradually slips – mostly under pressure from Pepsi. Coca-Cola executives realize that the threat is serious, and it seems to them that taste is a key battlefield.
Early 1985 – rumours circulate that Coca-Cola is testing a new formula. And indeed they are. Thousands of consumers choose the new sweeter flavour in blind taste tests like those used in the Pepsi Challenge. No one tests whether the taste actually influences the purchase decision when users are aware of the brand.
April 23 1985 – To great fanfare (followed by an enormous “thud”), chairman and chief executive officer Roberto Goizueta announces New Coke to the world as a better tasting alternative to the old Coke that was still dominating the world’s brandscape.
Supporting “the Cos”: In an act of selfless, heart-warming altruism, Bill Cosby brings his considerable charm to bear on the issue telling the world that he personally prefers the new taste.
April 23 1985 – Meanwhile in Ottawa Canada, a pencil-necked grade nine kid in a Hewey Lewis and the News concert t-shirt hears… the news. And although prior to this, he has only been an indifferent cola consumer, the news wallops him with an odd mixture of horror and deep personal indignation. At lunch, he and his friends talk in whispers and look to the sky for other signs of impending apocalypse.
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation broadcasts this scathing critique of the move. Check out the footage of the press conference “tasting”, the video message to retailers, and the response from Pepsi in which they declare victory in the Cola wars and give employees a celebratory holiday.
May, June 1985 – Stories circulate in the press of wide-spread hoarding of Coca-cola. Anecdotes like this one (of many) from the Coca-Cola Heritage site give a sense of the real urgency and panic that many consumers felt.
When the new Coke came out, I borrowed my friend’s pick-up and went to a club store and bought three pallets of regular Coke. It took two trips to get the Coke home. I had enough Coke to last me through the crisis, but I had to repair the floor in my spare bedroom – because of all the weight, the floor had sunk. It was well worth it.
Petitions are circulated, rallies are held, activist groups like the “Society for the Preservation of the Real Thing” and “Old Cola Drinkers of America” are formed, and Coca-Cola is swamped with angry response:
By June 1985, The Coca-Cola Company was getting 1,500 calls a day on its consumer hotline, compared with 400 a day before the taste change. People seemed to hold any Coca-Cola employee – from security officers at our headquarters building to their neighbors who worked for Coke – personally responsible for the change.
July 11, 1985 – Coca-Cola announces that they will be offering the old formula in parallel with the New Coke – which they call “Coca-Cola Classic”. There is widespread rejoicing.
In the decades that followed of course, New Coke became Coke II and then quietly disappeared as “Coca-Cola Classic” became the name for standard Coke again.
2007 – In Canada, the “Classic” was quietly dropped, but it remains on American packaging – albeit in smaller and smaller letters.
Brilliant conspiracy or colossal blunder?
But along the way home from their corporate Waterloo, a strange thing happened: Coca-Cola actually accomplished what they had set out to do in the first place: “to re-energize its Coca-Cola brand and the cola category in its largest market, the United States.” Coke sales surged, consumers breathed a collective sigh of relief, and Pepsi resigned itself to a seemingly permanent runner-up position in cola sales.
So of course, many conspiracy theorists have emerged claiming that Coca-Cola had planned this all along. But as they publically say on their Web site: “The company didn’t set out to create the firestorm of consumer protest that ensued”. Of course, they do try to put a positive spin on this bottle (with a little kiss of revisionism at the end):
The return of original formula Coca-Cola on July 11, 1985, put the cap on 79 days that revolutionized the soft-drink industry, transformed The Coca-Cola Company and stands today as testimony to the power of taking intelligent risks, even when they don’t quite work as intended.
(emphasis mine)
So here’s the real thing
That phrase “taking intelligent risks” doesn’t capture the enormous arrogance, ignorance, and shocking naïveté that went into the decision in the first place – and doesn’t capture the huge embarrassment and sense of crisis within the Coca-Cola company, or the tsunami of indignation that swept consumer society at large.
To sum up: New Coke made the corporation look really, really dumb. (But we forgave the brand).
Their big mistake (and it was a mistake): they treated the launch of a new formula as a problem that could be solved with product research, business logic, and a big ad campaign. In other words, they acted as if they had the right as a company to make such decisions, and we the customers would obviously be grateful.
The huge branding truth that became clear to this pencil-necked Hewey Lewis Fan:
Coca-Cola didn’t own their brand; I did.
Lessons for branders:
1) Respect the owners of your brand – your customers.
Yes, you own your “formula”, but they own the expectations and experiences built up over time – which are ultimately far more important than your brilliant launch plan.
2) Freedom’s just another word for everything to lose.
Coca Cola didn’t win because of New Coke, they won in spite of it – and because they were smart about getting out of it. For 99.9% of brands, a misadventure like this would be fatal.
Just a quick glance at the top ten from 2008 should be enough to show any brand manager that this is a list you a) want to be on eventually, b) need to be at least be aware of and understand the strategies of, and c) need to study, because like it or not, these brands are the rule-makers, breakers, and game changers in the world of branding.
And as I pointed out again in 
, coined a great rabbit-language word that I like to use to describe the consumer’s mind-state when faced with too much choice:
