Future Online Brands

As seen from increase in the number of internet users around the world, people will buy almost everything from meals to even cars or houses online in a near future. And at that time best online brands will dominate their sectors by using their capabilities and brand loyalty. To decide on the future top 10 brands, Futurelab 100 was investigated and found suitable and logical to use.

The Futurelab 100 ranks the online relevance of the world’s 100 most valuable brands as listed by Business Week/Interbrand. Its objective is to highlight to senior executives the importance of paying close attention to their brand’s performance in the online arena. The ranking is based on the number of times the brand’s name appears in leading search engines like Google, Baidu (leading Chinese search engine) and Technorati (a search engine for searching blogs), the number of links to the brands website, its reach and Page-rank relevance, and the number of times people express their “love” or “hate” for the brand.




The table above is obtained by a manual calculation for each brand in terms of the following criteria (Futurelab, 2006):
- the number times a brand is mentioned in Google
- the number of times a brand is mentioned in Baidu
- the number of Technorati blogposts about the brand
- the number of links to the brand’s dot-com (.com) website (URL Trends)
- the google page rank for the brand’s dot-com (.com) website
- the relative reach of the brand’s website (as per Alexa ranking)
- the number of times the wording “I love (brand)” and “(brand) is great” appeared in Google
- the number of times the wording “I hate (brand)” and “(brand) sucks” appeared in Google (in spite of its crudeness, this word has substantial statistical significance within a US context).

From the table it can be seen that Google is the most valuable online brand in the future and only 3 of top 10 offline brands found a place in top 10 online brands which are Microsoft, Disney and Nokia. eBay and amazon.com are recently known as the top performing online brands and according to futurelab’s study they will sustain their success in the future.