Baidu, in cooperation with Millward Brown, announced 2013 brand equity list on November 18 2013. Brand digital equity, a new concept proposed by Baidu, which combined big data of consumer search results with Millward Brown consumer brand equity research, evaluates brand performance in digital area from multi-dimensions.
Baidu’s list is a little different from Millward Brown’s BrandZ. BrandZ list is based on finance data and consumer data, and its China list only covered Chinese brands. Baidu digital equity covers all domestic and foreign brands’ performance in China online market.
Baidu analyzed brand equity in two dimensions: the number of pages, and the number of active links. With 90% netizen penetration rate and 1 billion search queries per day, Baid owns the most comprehensive and complete brand information and consumer behavior data.
Besides, Baidu cooperated with Millward Brown to demonstrate each other’s research results, and they found out that brand digital equity is highly correlated to brand loyalty. Baidu brand digital equity list includes 3C, travel, stock, retail,luxury, healthcare and other brands, about 20 categories.
In mobile brands, Chinese brands occupied 7 out of 10. Xiaomi ranked the third, surpassing traditional mobile brands Nokia. Nokia and Meizu ranked in the top 10, were not because of the sales of their mobile phones but for the topics about themselves.
Alibaba ranked the top in B2B brands in 2013, with dominant advantages.
In B2C brands, Taobao ranked the first, followed by Jingdong and Amazon.
Ctrip ranked the top in OTA (Online Travel Agency) brands, followed by Qunar and Elong.
One of the interesting list was China internet enterprise brands, Taobao ranked the top, followed by Tencent. Baidu was not included in the ranking. Although Tencent has the highest market value, Taobao is closely related to consumers. Consumers buy products on Taobao, while they only use Tencent’s QQ or Wechat for communication. This is why Taobao ranked higher than Tencent on brand digital equity list.
When Baidu’s brand digital equity list came out, some enterprises were pleased with their ranking while some grudged about it. Unlike search ranking, brand digital equity list is non-commercial and enterprises could not pay their way up. This means if enterprises want to improve their brand digital equity ranking, they will need to do more promotion on internet to improve online media coverage.