Last week's termination of Froogle, one of Google's most unfortunate brands, prompted cackles from marketing sophisticates. The rubes at the Googleplex really ought to hire some professionals, wrote Owen Thomas of Business 2.0. Not so fast: a study of name recognition and reputation, by Millward Brown Optimor, concludes that Google is now the world's most valuable brand, worth more than $66bn. For the chart, here, we cross-referenced the top brands against their US marketing spend, as measured by Advertising Age. Mountain View achieved its position with a minute fraction of the marketing spending of other tech companies such as Microsoft and IBM. If that's marketing naivete, can I have some please?

Contact information for this author is not available.