By Denna Bowman
Michelin has dominated the results in an influential online brand prominence survey for the sixth consecutive year.
The study also revealed that the French tyre manufacturer has notched up a record score for the survey carried out for Tyres & Accessories, a leading industry publication.
And Michelin also came out top in the second online brand equity measurement – for sentiment – for the third year on the trot, demonstrating the firms continuing dominance in this field too.
The report, which was compiled in association with the artificial intelligence experts at Cambridge-based Envisional, states: “The Envisional analysis into online appearances or “mentions” of 17 major tyre brands, followed identical studies (looking at 12 of these brands) carried out in September 2005, August 2006, July 2007, October 2008 and September 2009.”
Envisional’s DEX methodology measures the online penetration of, and the sentiment of the references to, these brands. The analysts used their Discovery Engine technology to identify and classify mentions of the 17 brands. The system crawled the Internet over a four-day period between 15 and 18 July 2010, during which time the it classified just under 14,000 relevant web pages.
It continued: “The analysis shows that, as was observed in all previous studies, Michelin achieved the greatest degree of online prominence by a significant margin. This has actually somewhat increased compared with 2009 to a new high of 2.92 on the prominence scale.”
And it added: “Looking at Michelin’s well-known Bibendum emblem, you may not have previously thought that he is something of techno-wizard. But, apart from the ubiquitous plaudits that go with winning anything, what do the results mean and what do companies gain from relative strength in each of the categories?
“As far as prominence is concerned simply getting your brand’s name in front of the increasing numbers of tyre-buying online masses has to be a good thing. The prominence data reported here goes one step further than just measuring the relative extent of total brand coverage across the Internet, by calculating the number of web pages which feature each brand as well as the prominence of the brand in each occurrence. As a result, this statistic provides a measure of the relative likelihood of the brands being indexed in a set of search-engine results. And with more people buying online than ever before – some sources put it as high as 9 per cent in certain European markets – this cannot be a bad thing.”
The report states that the remainder of the top six most-prominent brands – Bridgestone, Continental, Goodyear, Dunlop and Pirelli – have stayed the same as in the previous five years. The one change being that Goodyear dropped from second place in 2009 to fourth position in 2010.