Asa Dotzler: Firefox and more

This must be the "best brand among technophiles." I could walk down the street here in Tucson and ask 100 people about Skype. I bet somewhere between 97 and 100 would say "Skype? What's that?" I bet Firefox would exceed 50% recognition. All the rest on the global list would be at or near 100% recognition. Maybe Skype is crazy huge in Europe and I didn't know it.

Even the US/Canada list seems skewed. Craigslist is only really useful in the largest cities. Whole Foods only has 170 stores in the entire US and Canada, again mostly in or near the biggest cities. Lance Armstrong?? Average Joe: "He's that guy that rides a bike, right?"

I don't understand those stats.

How can Firefox be 15'th in US&Canada, *not appear at all* in any other list, and end up in 8'th position in the Global list ?

The lists reflect so different things in each region that it shows strong bias problem. Seeing "Lonely Planet" appears on the asia-pacific list, actual asia-pacific people don't use "Lonely Planet" that much. Why do europeans list Al Jazeera every year since 2002 but never does US&Canada ? The list's supposed to include negative influence as well as positive.

It might be funny to read, but I think this list has very little actual signifiance.

Hmm these stats are very odd.
But it's readers choice - so what? - WhoTF has heard of it before?

Please stop posting off-topic comments. Thanks.

- A

Ok, I don't want to whinge here or anything, but the Firefox devs mustn't forget about the brand value when deciding upon things like the controversial 'ping' attribute.

To a lot of people, the Firefox brand means 'security', and 'makes me safe from all that spyware stuff'. For many people this is the only reason they switched (though they may stay for it's many other good points)

*I* know, that the 'ping' attribute doesn't enable anything that's not already possible with CSS or Javascript. So do a lot of other tech-savvy users. But a lot of power-users and everyday end users do not know this. Adding the ping attribute by default will be viewed by some of these people as 'selling out' to the marketers, and going against what they see as a big part of the Firefox idea.

So all I'm saying is don't underestimate the power of the Firefox brand, but also remember how easily it can be lost. Yes, it sucks that politics plays a part in making technical decisions about minor features. But that's what comes with popularity.

Asa, how often do you google yourself.....no sorry, you must be using vivisomo...yes firefox is the greatest, particular with all these Opera features extentioned in, the latest '2 Pane Bookmarks'.... Have you done some research on icon colour preferences....there is a clear shift towards orange ;>)

What's Zara and why on earth is it a bigger brand than Coca-Cola and Nike? I gave up on zara.com since it seems to be 100% flash-based. I don't buy this list.

It's interesting how IKEA rates much higher than Firefox is. I know lots of places in the US alone where no one even knows what an IKEA is. The only reason why I know is that I married a Swede and moved to IKEA's home country.

Firefox, on the other hand, has probably been mentioned among friends or in the news, so that even my grandma may have heard mention of Firefox at one point or another.

That's really cool (the ranking).

frankf: Where do you live? I'm in Uppsala.

Cool. It's first success story for open source project.

Those rankings are seriously wacky.

wget: Zara is apparently a clothing store chain; see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zara_(clothing)

jmdesp: if you look at the methodology (see http://www.brandchannel.com/start1.asp?fa_id=298) you'll note that voting for global was made independent of regional voting (that is, they did not somehow average the regional votes to get a global number).

Greg > "Maybe Skype is crazy huge in Europe and I didn't know it."
It is true that since the launch of skype out, it is increasing a lot of in europe ... maybe because local communication and international between european countries stay more expensive that in North America ...

David, I knew you were from Sweden, but I didn't know where exactly. I live in Falun, though 4 years ago, I was living just north of Denver, Colorado. :)

While I really would like to find this heartening, as with most "Reader's Choice Awards", I wouldn't read much into it. Especially since I had not even heard of Brandchannel.com before this. Also, it seems to have too many inconsistencies to be believable. For instance, whether we like Microsoft or not, it is hard to imagine a worldview where Firefox has more impact than Microsoft (as yet :-)). I mean if you ask a 100 people on the street about Firefox and Microsoft, I can't imagine a demographic that would know the former and not the latter (or is more "impacted" by the former than the latter).

"I wouldn't read much into it" pretty much sums it up.

Were it not for IE's spwyare/security problems and Firefox being the 'refreshed mozilla suite' at the right time (and Mozilla Suite being totally ignored, and god, who can look at those dated Netscape icons?), Firefox wouldn't even be getting a look in by the masses, IMO. Once that security benefit is lost or, the brand will be diluted.

Oh god, I sound like a pathetic marketing drone.

I realize that I’m posting late but maybe someone will grab this.
In my experience and knowledge, I’ve seen this and most other Firefox marketing achievements come from the fans fondness for the Firefox logo. I simply love it and so do others, so they share it and promote. You can see evidence of this all over the Internet, especially when you do a search for Firefox and the logo on deviantART, Google Yahoo or whatever.
The logo is like the flag of Firefox Nation, it represents what we all do and love.
What still blows me away is how new Fx is and where its going to be 5 years from now.
Hell, even next year.