Can the internet be used to build brand awareness? How best to measure success of online brand building efforts?
An article in Friday’s New York Times talking about how Lenovo plans to build its consumer brand presence caught my eye. I have been working on this issue of online brand building and using online usage data to measure brand awareness for a few years. Lenovo offers a really interesting case study.
Lenovo bought IBM’s personal computing business in early 2005 and has begun to migrate branding from IBM to Lenovo. The firm is reportedly going to use online marketing to build its brand in conjunction with its sponsorship of the Beijing Olympics. This offers a great opportunity to measure brand awareness – testing success of Lenovo’s efforts – and to showcase online usage data as a measure of brand awareness.
The following chart shows the share of searches for IBM and Lenovo over the past four years.

Search term volume is an indicator of top of mindedness of a brand name. IBM has scaled back advertising as it sold its personal computing arm to Lenovo. You can see the rapid result in the chart. At the same time, we have seen some increase in searches for Lenovo particularly in February 2006 during the Turin Olympics which Lenovo sponsored.
This offers a starting point to measure Lenovo’s success moving forward at building brand awareness. Will we see an increase in searches for “Lenovo” over the summer?
Another useful measure for brand marketers is brand association. We use our Search Term Suggestion report for this to look at what words consumers include with a brand name in searches. In this case, what words do consumers include in searches for “thinkpad” and “think pad”. Do they associate the IBM brand with the computer still or are they migrating to Lenovo?
The highest volume term was “ibm thinkpad” followed by “lenovo thinkpad”. In the past four weeks, the volume of searches for “ibm thinkpad” was 64% higher than for “lenovo thinkpad”.
I will update this data as the summer unfolds. Stay tuned…