The top 100 brands have a total value of $2.04 trillion. Does it seem like a big problem? Yeah, it sounds like that to me too. Let’s take a look at the top 4 brands in the world ranked by total value.

1.Google

2.IBM

3 apple

4. microsoft

I don’t know anyone in the developed world who hasn’t heard of each of these brands. Name recognition is only one aspect of Branding, but it is very powerful. Take a few seconds and think about each of these brands separately. I’m willing to bet that you can tell me what your logo looks like, what are your company colors, what are many of your products, what is the public perception of them, etc.

Let me give you an example of a successful brand:

Jim sneezes, so he grabs a Kleenex. The sneeze causes his ears to plug up and he grabs a Q-tip to clean his ear. Wondering what makes your ears clogged when you sneeze, Jim decides to grab his Mac and Google it.

That paragraph is what you call the ultimate in Branding. Let’s break it down, shall we? What Jim actually used was a tissue, but the brand has been so successful for Kleenex that the words are synonymous. The same goes for the cotton swab. Another marker of ultimate success when it comes to Branding is when your company name becomes a word of its own. Google became a verb to describe the act of searching for information online.

Google has built such a powerful brand that it surpassed all other search engines to become synonymous with Internet search. For those of you who aren’t as tech-savvy as I am, let me give you a little background. The first search engine in history is one that most people have never heard of. It was called Archie and it was created in 1990 at a University of Montreal and was short for “archives”. This search engine was on a page that presented itself as “Archie’s Inquiry Form.” Archie was created before the World Wide Web existed and lived on the Gopher. Six years and several search engines later and we have Google. Did you know that Google’s original name was BackRub due to the backlink indexing it was based on? Did you know that the name Google is actually the misspelled word googol? Did you know that the simplistic design of the Google website is due to the fact that the creators were not technically versed in HTML code? What’s my point in this whole Google story, and what does that have to do with you?

It’s showing that you don’t have to be first at something to be successful. It is not necessary to have an original idea. You do not have to be technically proficient in software, computers, or technology. You don’t even have to be a good speller to be successful. However, you must be good at Branding and selling yourself.

So how do you get good at Branding and selling yourself? That will be the subject of my next article; at least I’ll start on it. Explaining how to achieve a successful brand will take several articles and I hope to publish them soon.