Mark RaskinoThis week the UK Superbrands consumer 500 list was published. Superbrands is an organisation which evaluates perceptions of brands on an annual basis. There are Superbrands councils of senior marketing professionals in many countries now and they usually publish the results in a book. There are separate B2B brand and consumer brand evaluation exercises which use large survey panels. The scoring criteria consumers are asked to consider include market dominance, longevity, goodwill, customer loyalty and market acceptance. Results are published in rank order, with the scores.
So here are the three significant things I have noticed about IT in the UK consumer listing this time:
1) As usual IT brands are at the very top of ALL brands
For example, this year in the UK Microsoft is #1, Google is #3 – and they are separated by Rolex #2
(Apple is the only other top ten tech entry at #9)
2) Mobile phone handset makers do a lot better than mobile telecoms service providers
So for example Nokia #59 and Sony Ericsson #115 beat Vodafone #151 and O2 #204.
I don’t keep track of the mobile and wireless industry myself, but I guess this gap is wider than I expected.
3) Some big business IT names don’t appear in the consumer list – but the cloud names do.
So SAP, Cisco and Oracle are not there- though some do appear in the separate B2B Superbrands list. This is because the branding experts who pre-select the list for the consumer panel to consider, did not see these as consumer facing. Typing this on my Lenovo Thinkpad – I wonder why they still include IBM, but that’s an aside. Most of the big names strongly associating themselves with the Cloud term are present. In addition to Microsoft and Google – IBM #61, HP #71 and Amazon #155 are included. Other ‘cloud based’ brands are also visible: Yahoo #140, You Tube #169 Facebook #248 and Ebay #322.
Why should you care? Its all about the consumerization of IT. There’s of a partial strategy split within the IT industry between those who see a consumer play as synergistic and those who would find it a distraction. Through the 1990s and into the early 2000′s this perhaps wasn’t so significant. Though large IT contract co-signatory business managers might be influenced by the consumer brand halo – that could be easily countered by the use of sales force in-person persuasion. However the cloud might create a universe of many more individual business user ‘voting’ decisions, that sum to the corporate policy decision. The wisdom of corporate professional crowds clicking towards one provider’s freemium enticement service or another’s, might become a bigger part of the overall provider contract decision forming process.
Anyhow – there are 10 business IT brands in the top 100, three of those are in the top 10 and for the third year in a row, a tech brand is #1. That has to be a cause for the IT industry to congratulate itself on its marketing capabilities, because in case you were wondering…. Coca Cola only managed 7th place.
Comments Off
Category: Uncategorized Tags:
