Category: Planning

The Googleplex, home of the world’s most valuable brand. Image courtesy of Keso.

According to new research from WPP released this week, and to which adliterate was given a sneek preview, Google is now officially the most valuable brand on earth – at $66,434m ahead of GE, Microsoft and Coca Cola.

This is the second year that WPP and Millward Brown have produced a ranking of the world’s most powerful brands (using a methodology that is markedly different to other brand equity studies), however it is the first in which Google has reached the top spot.

And yet more proof, if it were needed, that while brands always win the speed at which the brandscape is being rearranged at the moment means no-one can be complacent about their position in peoples’ hearts, minds and wallets.

For the brand valuation geeks I have summarised the WPP approach but you can always cut out the middle-blog and go straight to the study here.

Image courtesy of MrTruffle

I am bored witless by the ‘is blogging killing planning?’ debate now -it isn’t, end of story. But in a pathetic attempt to have the last word on the matter here is the very short opinion piece I did for UK ad bible Campaign.

Image courtesy of Sagasurfer.

Much of my time is spent at the moment thinking about the nature of brand ideas – how to build them, and critically how to spot whether what you have got is good enough.

To date I have been unable to create a fail safe ready reckoner for great brand ideas – although regular readers will know I have a very particular approach to building them.

The truth is that there is no process that you can follow that will churn out great brand ideas, you just sort of, have to have them. And please do not be fooled by charlatans that claim to have a special product, process or workshop to generate these ideas, any hardware is only as good as the software that runs on it.

However, I think that there is one thing that is absolutely true of great brand ideas – they are generous.

Image courtesy of cutangus

One of the great criticisms of the plannersphere is that it is data shy.

So here are three lovely charts for the data hungry amongst you to feast on.

Image courtesy of MrTruffle

There is a mood abroad, often fostered by non-blogging planners, that the emergence and popularity of planning blogs is killing the discipline.

I certainly feel that the community, like all communities, has begun to coalesce around specific ‘new marketing’ ideas that are in danger of becoming an orthodoxy every bit as dangerous as the antiquated ideas about brands and communications that it is seeking to replace. Specifically it encourages a view that the marketing landscape has already reached a kind of utopian future without offering any clues about how brands and the clients that own them should get there.

But is blogging really ‘killing’ planning?

Russell is a gent and he has done me the considerable honour of posting part of an inteview he did with me here . While the second session is here . To be honest I think the first one is rather better but you be the judge.

In a way I am finding that these interviews help hone my thinking better than posting to the blog – hope you can find something of use in here.

Thankyou to everyone that contributed to the post on brand ideas and their seeming rarity value.

I had wanted to create a definitive set of criteria for judging whether you had a proper brand idea or not. But this exercise wasn’t particularly fruitful – or at least I think its tough to try an legislate for strategic genius. And indeed as decent a list as any was included in the post I wrote about Jon Steel’s Perfect Pitch – truth, beauty, excitement, significance and persuasion if you remember.

But I really like this chart – it sort of fell out of the conversations.

The Black Rhino (Diceros bicornis). With a population decline of 98% between 1970 and 1990 there are few animals more critically endangered than this.

Of all the beasts roaming free in the world of marketing there is none so rare as the brand idea.

I’ve stolen this from Jon Steel because I really like it as way to judge the quality of an idea – strategic or otherwise.

“Theory cannot be fabricated out of the results of observations – it can only be invented” Einstein