Surfarama

I hate to blockquote so much of a great post, but if you have any interest in marketing and brand and business generally, you need to read this…

Quick – what’s the top brand in the world? Coca-Cola? Nope. IBM? Nope. One of GE’s stable of brands? Wrong again.
All these players are near the top. But the most powerful brand in the world today is, according to the gold standard of brand valuation, Millward Brown’s Brandz report, Google.

Now, that might seem superficially logical. But from a strategic point of view, it’s nothing short of astonishing. Why? Because every other player in the top ten has spent decades – if not literally centuries, as for P&G and Coke – investing billions in advertising to build a brand.

But where these players invest on the order of 5-10% of revenues on advertising, Google’s advertising expenditure is almost exactly zero.

Read the rest, it’s really good (and there’s a bonus video).

I’ve often reflected that pretty much everything we need to know about marketing was written back in 1999 when the Cluetrain Manifesto was published on the thesis that “markets are conversations”.

And this is what Umair is saying essentially, that the value of traditional brand equity is fast eroding as the cost of interaction amongst consumers drops and the value of that interaction grows…in other words ‘consumers’ (aka people) would much rather talk to other consumers than consume mass media from corporations…and they can do this much more efficiently than the corporations can carpet bomb them with media.

So at the very least we all better be listening to those conversations, if not actively being part of the conversation…which if you’re reading this probably comes second nature because you are already participating.

UPDATE: I posted this late last night and kinda ran out of steam, but went to sleeping thinking about it and there’s definitely more to say, particularly about the challenges that traditional businesses clearly have with participatiion…I mean it isn’t like the individuals within large traditional organizations are not participating (lots are), but often those organizations do seem to have to have some old school notions of brand and organizational blockers which prevent effective particpation, e.g. “blog writing isn’t on anyones job description!”.

Anyway, it also occurred to me that I should cross post this to Online Marketer (our new team blog) and continue the conversation there. The blog is just getting started, but if you are interested in online marketing I promise it will be worth subscribing to.

This post serves as a landing page for folks redirected from freetunes.co.nz, which I have decided to close down now that I’ve downsized to a very modest VPS and need to conserve my bandwidth.

Freetunes was a bit of an experiment I had been running in a very adhoc way for a while now…basically it mashed up the Google search API and some social features to make it easy to find and share stashes of MP3s on the web.

Y’all know about the advanced search queries you can use to find media files on Google directly. Freetunes just added a layer for users to give a thumbs up or down to results they viewed so that popular results always showed up first. Searching using the advanced parameters is always a bit hit and miss so Freetunes let everyone take advantage of the work done by others to hunt out the best results.

It mostly worked pretty well but I’m trying to simplify so there’s no room for it anymore.

A little over a year ago I discovered a Cold Fusion Q & A site, cfanswers.org (via Matt Haughey). I don’t know anything about CF, but I was totally taken by the way the site was put together…it was what Yahoo! Answers and the rest of them should be like. Beautifully simple and with just the right attention to UI to make it a pleasure to use. Stuff like having links to download .txt versions of particular answers, and nice ajax flourishes for rating answers etc. It was just really well done, so it’s sad to see that the site hasn’t survived and the domain now seems to be dead. [...]