Not all British dotcom BrandZ (sic) fail to hit the mark

Greg Grimmer, partner, Hurrell Moseley Dawson & Grimmer, encourages British dotcom successes to go global…

Today the news wires have been populated by Millward Brown’s BrandZ (why oh why use a Z there?) survey of the world’s most valuable global brands.

The winners are the usual suspects of the dotcom/technology hubris and regular readers of my column will spot that I am about to return to one of my favourite polemic views of the world wide web. The information superhighway, the super-enabler of freedom of speech and choice is in fact a vehicle only for the Darwinian thesis of the ‘survival of the fittest’ – it is a place for winners, second place is nothing, second place is extinction.

The BrandZ survey has at its summit Apple, Google, Amazon and Facebook, and there is no place for their immediate challengers in their respective fields. Now you could of course argue that they are in fact competitive with each other as their multi-pronged product teams increasingly infringe on each other’s space, but in each case their background and heritage is based upon their original strength (you only have to look a Nokia’s fall from grace on the BrandZ survey to realise that if core competency is lost then the brand is lost too).

In the old world oligarchies existed almost in every sector. Shell, BP, Exxon in oil, Ford, GM, Chrysler in cars… even in more recent times – McDonald’s, Burger King and KFC in fast food. Now ‘First or Nothing’ is the mantra, especially when it comes to a web presence.

So what are we to make of the fact that no UK dotcoms or even wider technology companies make it to the top of surveys like BrandZ? Does this mean we lack worldwide reach despite our in built advantage of owning the global lingua franca?

The top ten UK brands do include two telecom brands (albeit one is Spanish owned) but nothing in the dotcom sphere. So I went looking elsewhere for signs of a UK success story or potential aspirant.

One of the most talked about UK dotcom success stories (almost entirely down to the enormous amounts of money invested into television advertising in a no-coincidental land grab/survival of the fittest battle) is the insurance aggregator sector. Confused, Compare the Market, Go Compare et al have all transformed that particular sector but have failed to even dominate the UK let alone take their idiosyncratic British brands overseas.

However, within the car sector there is a success story and one that fits my winner takes all model. Auto Trader (also HMDG’s founding client) – which to many still conjures up memories of an inky weekly second hand classified car magazine – has quietly, slowly, and steadily become a dotcom success story. In March nearly 11million unique users used the web site of a business, which at its peak sold only 500,000 magazines. It is perhaps more remarkable that one of the UK’s best e-commerce success stories actually has an old media heritage. It has been the transformation of the business that has made them successful rather than a green field idea that has capitalised on un-competitiveness or inertia in a particular sector.

This transformation took on a further leap earlier this year with the launch of Auto Trader’s new car site, which took the overall site to the staggering figure of over one billion impressions in March. This also takes the previously inky fingered brand in to close connection with the likes of BMW and Mercedes rather than their traditional customer base of used car sellers . The BrandZ compilers may want to take note.

The move from magazine to web has not stopped there either, as mobile platforms were added at the apposite time and now deliver over a million unique users per month and perhaps more importantly stopped a new competitor launching into the mobile app market, therefore preventing any slippage of users in the multiple device usage era which we now all inhabit.

Now there are a number of other powerful brands in the car sector – not least the BBC’s Top Gear, which seems to have global domination in its aim, but none seem to have taken the same route as the Auto Trader strategy of offering a car owning and buying service via the web. I think in part it has been able to action this strategy due to its ruthless elimination of weaker print brands (Exchange and Mart & Loot ) but also the way it has nimbly responded to the infringement on its sector by one of the true global internet giants eBay, who has now retreated and is more seen as a parts and spare seller rather than a marketplace for motors.

So with the Auto Trader UK brand expanding into new areas of expertise and devices, and competitors running scared, is now a good time for international expansion as a silicon valley company would do? Well it is already active in Eire, Italy, Canada and South Africa. But perhaps even more interesting than their launch into new cars was the investment in iAutos.cn, China’s leading classified motor site. As even a perfunctory glace at BrandZ will tell you over half of the new brands on this year’s survey come from the People’s Republic and it’s a good bet to think that in future a major presence in that market will be essential for any e-commerce brand with global aspirations.