Google Search Engine - Brand Recognition

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GOOGLE SEARCH ENGINE

BRAND RECOGNITION

Google is the most powerful search engine with over 1,2 trillion searches done each year and by analysing Google Trends data, it’s possible to analyse the brand recognition. Despite this, it has limitations considering it’s a relative measure and searching for a company does not provide a decisive take on whether a person is going to apply or not, besides that, we may identify outliers based on strong publicity which may be good or bad. Considering this, it’s still a powerful metric and allows us to at least identify interest in the respective brands.

The graphs presented next represent extracted data from Google Trends and the values are relative meaning that the 100 was the period in which there was the highest number of searches for that term, and the 60 means that the number of searches was 60% the maximum (or the peak at 100).

[pic 33] The first analysis was the data from searches around the world allowing us to have a more general view. The first thing we notice is the correlation between all of them, by testing this we obtained this results:

• Deloitte – PwC: 88%
• KPMG – PwC: 77%
• EY – PwC: 82%
• McKinsey – PwC: 79%

Surprisingly, McKinsey has a slightly higher correlation with PwC than KPMG. It was also compared the correlation in relation to McKinsey:

• Deloitte – McKinsey: 84%
• KPMG – McKinsey: 67%
• EY – McKinsey: 65%

So, both Deloitte and PwC are highly correlated with McKinsey in terms of trends while KPMG and EY are not so much. This can also be related to the revenues by segments, by comparing, we notice that both Deloitte and PwC have a considerable higher revenue in advisory/consulting than KPMG or EY, not only that, but in this case, the higher the revenues, the higher the correlation (Since it’s only four observations we cannot generalize this). For all the Big Four except Deloitte it was considered revenues for “Advisory”, for Deloitte it was considered the revenues for “Consulting” as stated in their report.

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It is also possible to identify a trend on periods of “low interest” during December of each year, this is a common occurrence on several other companies across different industries and the reason for this is the holiday season, particularly Christmas. This information will be later used to reduce the costs of a marketing plan.

Furthermore, we notice that the rank from Google Trends is not that diferent from the one obtained in students surveys around the world by Universum which was presented before. If we include the five companies, for the fiscal year of 2016 the obtained ranking was: EY, PwC, Deloitte, KPMG, and McKinsey. This ranking is the same as Google Trends, despite this, we notice that for the previous year the rank from Universum was slightly different, yet, Google Trends ranking was still the same. Reason for this is that this is only one of the factors which can influence the decision of students. We consider that brand recognition is related to Good reference for future career, and Attractive/exciting products and services, and therefore, improving this aspect will also improve recruitment campaings.

CONSULTING

The next phase of the analysis was to segment the worldwide search by focusing on the category of consulting, by doing this we focus on a very specific segment. As expected McKinsey & Company performs relatively better in this category, despite this, PwC still takes lead.

Interestingly, PwC has far higher searches in this category than any of the other Big Four, considering Deloitte has higher revenues it doesn’t seem to be an accurate result. We estimate that there may be two reasons to cause this:

1. Google Trends filter is not working properly: All the terms were identified as companies so the search results would be more accurate, which in itself is an available filter in Google Trends (If I choose the term apple, it can be both the fruit or company, in this cases the filter is necessary). By applying a second filter, “consulting”, Google only counts searches which would be related to consulting, and it may not be identifying properly if a search, for example for Deloitte, is specific for the consulting segment.
2. Business to Business is different than Business to Consumer: Obviously, there are differences, and Google Trends can be used much more accurately on the latter. In B2B it’s trickier to use this analysis, reason why it was later computed the relation between market share and this results, and it’s possible that for the average consumer or google user, PwC is more easily connected to consulting.

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In this graph, we can identify clearly a peak which resulted from PwC announcing it agreed to buy Booz & Co. (source Bloomberg), empowering PwC advisory business, and adding 3000 employees in 57 different locations worldwide.

This results also seemed to indicate that the gap between PwC and McKinsey is reducing, and it is possible to identify this by calculating the difference between PwC score and McKinsey. Technically, we could expect McKinsey awareness to surpass PwC in this category by 2019. This data must be interpreted carefully, as it’s obvious, this information does not mean market share, but it does mean that McKinsey as a brand has been gaining notice, at least compared to PwC.