The last ten years have seen Ford’s brand value steadily decrease while Google has broken into the top ten most valuable global brands. What have been the reasons for their contrasting fortunes and what do they tell us about building a successful brand? Neil Gibbons reports

Warning: brand values can go down as well as up. A welcome/ disheartening reminder of that lands each autumn in the form of Interbrand’s Best Global Brands Index, an annual cue for backslapping/ soul-searching – depending on how your firm has fared.

Now in its tenth year, the index’s back catalogue allows for a historical analysis that maps the fall and rise of household name brands. And two in particular stand out: one a runaway success story, the other in incontrovertible decline.

Google and Ford have enjoyed/endured startlingly different fortunes. In 1999, Google was a mere toddler, light years away from the Best Global Brands Index, having only just secured its first round of equity funding. Ford was high on the inaugural index, sitting in 7th place.

Today, it’s Google that occupies 7th spot. Ford has tumbled to 49th.

So what has been responsible for the rise and rise of the Google brand? And what are the factors that have scuttled Ford’s brand value? More importantly, what can their divergent trajectories tell us about what makes for a successful global brand?

According to Graeme Crossley, chief executive of communications agency Brand Reputation, all globally successful brands have four key characteristics. “A single brand promise, a ruthless focus on delighting customers, consistency and reliability, and ongoing innovation.”

While Google’s promise has been ‘search’, its success has been borne largely from the second of Crossley’s criteria – the quality of its offering. Maryanne Murray, client director at brand design consultancy Elmwood, believes that its inherent usefulness is what people now associate with the overall brand. “Their product works and works well,” she says. “Google continually gives me stuff I didn’t know I needed but that I really like. Maps, images, and so on. Google is a brand that got people’s attention and knows how to hold on to it. Nobody does it better – and if they do, we can’t remember their name.”

Google itself certainly regards the usefulness of its offering as the nub of its brand success. “We’re lucky enough to be popular because our technology gives people what they’re looking for,” says Oliver Rickman, Google’s head of communication in the UK. “We haven’t tended to go in for big branding campaigns, but instead focused much more on the usefulness of Google’s products and how they help people and businesses get the most out of the internet. When someone finds the perfect Christmas present through Google search, or finds the perfect house through Google Street View, or learns how to roast the perfect chicken through a YouTube video, that’s when our brand benefits.”

Cheryl Geovannoni is European president of branding consultancy Landor Associates. For her, what lies at the heart of Google’s ability to remain so vital is innovation – another of Crossley’s key ingredients. “It is constantly innovating to ensure it stays relevant,” she says. “Think of Google Labs where there are teams developing new utilities every day to help solve everyday problems for us.”

By continuing to diversify – the success of Google Chrome and its move into phones and other new revenue sources have borne fruit – Google casts its brand as a restless innovator. Some might consider this dangerously skittish but Graham Hales, UK managing director of the index’s authors Interbrand, argues that innovation and restlessness needn’t equate to a company losing sight of its core. He gives great credit to Google management for infusing a cohesive, tunified ethos that is apparent inside the company and out. “They’ve created a company that understands the marketplace, and a culture that feels appropriate to its brand,” he says.

“They’ve created a Google university, Google campuses, and even the way they recruit makes Google on the inside the same as it appears on the outside.”

That, of course, creates a narrative, a story that encourages audiences to buy into the brand – what Murray describes as “a compelling brand story in action”. She continues: “All of the elements are there for people to believe in and remember Google – from two young rebels who shook up the world from their campus dorm rooms, the rejection of the walled garden concept prevalent at the time of their inception, to an irreverent name and a mindblowing IPO.”

Careful nurturing of the brand identity has also played its part – as Hales says, “They have managed their identity in a way that is appropriate to Google. Created in beta, it’s something they have fun with. They certainly seem keener to play with their logo than most companies do. That shows they’re not taking themselves too seriously. So our expectations are built around that identity.”

The firm receives a lot of feedback – almost always positive. So while this flexibility may be anathema to traditionalists who still bang the drum of strictly micro-managed brand control, audiences are now willing to accept this playfulness.

“Managing your brand used to be about controlling perceptions of who you are, by being absolutely consistent in the message, design and tone of your every broadcast,” says Simon Lake, managing director of corporate communications agency Likemind. “But a brand today is part of multiple communities, all of which want to have an honest conversation with you. They don’t want to be fed a corporate message on repeat, they want a personal response. Consistency and branding will still be bedfellows. But whereas once a brand was a fortress that fended off intruders, now we actively want it to invite us in.”

According to Lake, a modern, effective brand must show its different sides and “loosen its reins” on the people and marketing that represent it. “Google is so at ease with itself that it changes the design of its identity for Christmas and St Patrick’s Day, and every other occasion in between. For the vast majority of us, it just makes us like Google more. Which means better relationships more likely to last.”

And then there’s Ford. Of course, no one is suggesting that the venerable car manufacturer is a masterclass is how to destroy a brand. It remains after all one of the 50 most valuable in the world. But its inability to arrest the slow decline in that value over the last decade surely offers lessons to others.

Ford declined to comment for this article. But branding and communications experts are less reticent. Yes, says Hales, the automotive sector has suffered considerably in recent years, but that in itself doesn’t explain the downward trajectory in Ford’s ranking. “It is a difficult market, but within that some are doing a better job than others,” he says.

For a start (and in stark contrast to Google’s way with brand identity), Ford has been criticised for its clumsy grasp of product branding, with a raft of cars alliteratively named or renamed in an apparent attempt to hammer home the ‘Ford’ name. In recent years, Ford has unveiled the Freestar, the Freestyle, the Five Hundred, the Fusion and the Flex. The Fiesta is due to launch stateside in 2010.

“We don’t understand the fixation Ford has with the sixth letter of the alphabet,” writes Chris Shunk on the influential automotive site autoblog.com. “We’d like for Ford to give us an effing break.”

In fact, there’s a general consensus seems to be that Ford has allowed itself to become stale. “Ford lost sight of what originally made them successful, namely innovation,” says Murray. “Somewhere along the way they misinterpreted their proposition. It became the end result of volume production, and the brand steamrolled down the path of repetition. The blue oval became just a badge to be mortgaged and slapped onto as many nameplates as they pleased. What the brand stood for became buried and lost.”

It’s crucial, she says, to define what you stand for and make that the core of everything you do. “You can be as creative as you like, as long as you can prove that everything you make, say and do maps back to that single-minded proposition. And remember that your proposition still has to be big and audacious enough to stay relevant. Google understand that, ‘all of the world’s information’ gives them an infinite amount of longevity.”

Simon Lake agrees that Ford fails to make clear what it stands for. “When you think of most car manufacturer brands, you have a clear sense of their personality and what they’re about. Audi, Volkswagen, BMW and Mercedes say German engineering at its best, Volvo says safety and even Toyota says never breaks down.”

These companies have seen forward-thinking products transform the entire corporate brand. Hales says Toyota has seen “a green halo” spread from the Prius over the whole range. “Even the four-wheel drive vehicles benefit from that. It gives them a landmark. They are already evolved and are still moving in that direction. That restlessness comes to define the brand.”

A lack of that restlessness can be poison though – and would appear to have hobbled Ford. As Landor’s Geovannoni points out, Ford has very little to recommend it over its competitors. “It’s not fresh, innovative, it doesn’t surprise and delight its potential customers enough to want to make it a badge they feel good to wear. It solves only one problem, and there are lots of others who solve that problem better - more stylishly, more trendily, with more attitude, more fun, better design, better environmental credentials. There just isn’t enough reason to drive one, and the brand has no compelling story that would force you to put it on your shopping list.”

Rectifying that perception is like turning round an oil tanker. It takes time and work, says Interbrand’s Hales.

“It’s incredibly difficult to suddenly start doing that when you’re behind the curve,” he says. “If you aren’t ahead of the curve, you pay the penalty for not having invested earlier. Once you’ve lost your franchise in people’s minds, it’s very difficult to win it back. Ford’s problem is similar to [clothes retailer] Gap. If your brand is strong, people will shop for you actively. That can last for a long time, because you’re the natural selection, and people will select you on autopilot. But when your brand is weak, people double take and think about whether you’re the best.”

Google’s brand value
$31.98 billion, up 25%
“Continued diversification of Google’s business, from new advertising models to online publishing, drives growth. The common theme is low price and high functionality with added transparency. Google Chrome is two times faster than competitors and stole browser market share equal to third- and fourth-placed competitors within 24 hours. This year, Google has continued to innovate. It released the Android phone software on September 2008, which involved disclosing the source code for the Google phone to engineers around the world. As the brand grows it has to deal with the inevitable mistrust and ugliness ascribed to being a very large, diversified, and very profitable company.”
Source: Best Global Brands 2009

Ford’s brand value
$7 billion, down 11%
“Ford has seen revenues decreasing, despite early eff orts at reinventing itself. It hopes to become what Chairman William Ford Jr. Calls a ‘global, green, high-tech company’. Like the other Detroit ‘Big Three’ it was forced to restructure its brand portfolio by selling weak brands, but did not succeed in finding a buyer for Swedish carmaker Volvo. Unlike Chrysler and GM, it was able to avoid filing for Chapter 11. Despite its embattled business, Ford courageously launched one of the most aggressive vehicle electrification programs in the industry. By 2012, it plans to produce at least four high-mileage vehicles that will use the newest forms of battery technology in a family of hybrids, plug-in hybrids, and battery-powered vehicles. The move to green will take a long time and it remains to be seen if the consumer can be convinced that this is more than just greenwashing.”
Source: Best Global Brands 2009