The recent global recession was so powerful that Lehman Brothers collapsed. On that day, September 15, 2008, the collapse of the once richest banks in the world set off panic that reverberated around the world, and for many, will be remembered as the signal event of the worst financial crisis since the Second World War. Companies of almost all industries were suffering from the global economic downturn except for one. That is the search engine giant – Google.
Despite the loss of trust in brands by consumers this year, but Google’s brand value rose 25% to an astounding $31.9 billion. Impressive! Google was the star of the list in the listing of the 100 most valuable global brands surveyed by Interbrands. It was ranked seventh, up from 10th place last year and 20th the year before. On the contrary, companies from the financial sector accounted for four of the top five biggest fallers, with drops by American Express (now number 22, down from 15) HSBC (now 32, down from 27), Citi (now 36, down from 19), and UBS (now 72, down from 41). Merrill Lynch and AIG both dropped off the list.
Frankly speaking, I’m rather dismayed by Google’s enormous growth in terms of brand value and its resistance to the recession. It has managed to achieve tremendous success despite the recession and beaten some of the giants in the tech industry – Intel ($30 billion), Hewlett-Packard ($24 billion), Apple ($15 billion) and Dell ($10 billion). Well, the main reason behind Google’s steady rise in brand value could be the presidency of Larry Page and Brin Sergey. They were the driving force behind the search engine giant and has helped to expand the company to other useful services/products such as its Android mobile operating system, the Chrome web browser. Recently, both co-founders top the ‘T3 Tech 100‘ list, which ranks the top 100 most influential people in technology.
Interbrand CEO Jez Frampton said Google’s brand growth is “miraculous,” though the report notes that as it gets bigger, “it has to deal with the inevitable mistrust and ugliness ascribed to being a very large, diversified and very profitable company.”
In growth terms, it was closely followed by Amazon, which saw its brand equity boosted 22% to almost $8 billion. On the other hand, leader of the software industry, Microsoft suffered a drop of 4% to $56 billion.
The top two placings in the list go to longtime staples -Coca Cola and IBM, followed by Microsoft, GE and Nokia. Both Coca Cola and IBM retained their spots as the world’s two most valuable brands with a value of $68.7 billion and $60.2 billion respectively.