PKB

Asa passes on a BrandChannel.com reader survey that ranks Firefox the 8th most impactful global brand in 2005, behind Nokia and Yahoo!, ahead of eBay and Sony. (BrandChannel.com is a well-established site that focuses on branding topics.)

Read the full article, or view just the chart that shows Firefox and the other brands in the reader top 10.

So what does this all mean? And why does it matter?

Get a basic overview of branding over at Wikipedia. The “Concepts” section will get you a quick summary of the language marketers use when discussing “brand.” The thing to walk away with is that there’s a reason why companies invest billions of dollars a year worldwide to promote their brands, whether it’s TV ads, print campaigns or sponsorships.

The reason is that years of increasingly refined market research have validated the fact that brand preference translates into a meaningful competitive advantage in our current economic system.

The job of a brand marketer is to, through a variety of measures, lodge a company’s brand somewhere deep in your frontal lobe, so that at some time in the future, when you’re in the store, or shopping online, or thinking about buying a new car, company X’s brand pops into your head as the preferred choice.

But it’s not enough to make the company’s logo appear in your head. An effective brand will also deliver a payload of emotion. It will make you associate qualities with company X’s brand that you’d normally reserve for people.

Try this exercise.

Think about a category of products. Say, computers.

Now what’s the first company that popped into your head? Was it Apple?

What sorts of things did you feel when you thought about Apple?

More importantly, how did those feelings get inside you in the first place?

This is part of branding, and why it matters. For Apple, it matters about this much: $8 billion, in value added to the overall enterprise by their brand in 2005.

Firefox is on this list because it’s an insanely great Web browser. I take this as reinforcement that the non-traditional ways in which our users have spread the word about Firefox can be more compelling than mass salvos of highly polished, gleaming brandoids. We just need to figure out how to scale our grassroots efforts out to a much bigger group of people…