Marketing can sound woefully fluffy. The
language of “emotional engagement”, “consumer passion-points” and “key
influencers” the industry has become so fond of is a tough sell to senior
executives under pressure to deliver hard returns from their investment in
advertising.
Little wonder that executives at
Procter &
Gamble and
Mondelez
International have felt able to recently squeeze ad agencies by
delaying
payments for 75 days and 120 days respectively.
Advertising spending will hit $518bn this year, ZenithOptimedia estimates,
yet as the media face rapid digital, mobile and social changes, brand owners
have never been less sure of the returns that investment will yield.
It is tempting, then, to ignore a report about “meaningful brands” as more
waffle. The idea of a phone, a car, a shampoo or a running shoe having much
meaning sounds like an ad executive’s outlandishly lofty promise for “a product
that will change your life”.
Yet
the Meaningful
Brands study released this week by the media buying arm of French marketing
group Havas deserves to be taken more seriously.
First, its methodology lends it weight: Havas asked 134,000 consumers in 23
countries for their views on 700 brands, and set out to define “meaning” by 12
measures of brands’ contributions to individuals’ quality of life and to wider
society. Some metrics were borrowed from OECD and World Bank indices of what
some call gross national happiness, for what Umair Haque, a Havas Media
director, dubs the first attempt to connect human wellbeing with brands.
Second, it focuses precisely on the hard numbers that corporate bean-counters
like. The 25 brands that consumers deemed “most meaningful” outperformed global
equities by 120 per cent in the last decade.
Those top brands are not all obvious ones, when measured by usual benchmarks
of revenues, market capitalisation or brand value.
Apple, for
example, is the world’s most valuable company – at the time of writing – and
tops
WPP’s BrandZ list
of the world’s most valuable brands, but ranks at 22 on the Meaningful Brands
list. Other brands –
Google,
Samsung,
Microsoft and
Sony – share the
top five spots in the list with
Nestlé; a
reflection, Havas says, of how technology has empowered consumers.
Havas diplomatically declines to name the laggards, but McDonald’s, number
four on the BrandZ list, is not in its 25 most meaningful. Nor is
General Motors,
one of America’s biggest advertisers. Financial and energy companies score
badly, and despite their global growth, Chinese brands are not breaking
through.
The disconnect has not happened overnight. But what caused it, and how can
brands be more meaningful?
In mature markets, brand saturation may be part of the problem. You hardly
need to spend long in an American supermarket to conclude there are simply too
many indifferent brands out there.
More importantly, too many brands have been making promises they cannot
fulfil. Slightly less than a third of consumers think brands communicate
honestly, resulting in growing distrust.
After the effort and money spent on corporate social responsibility
programmes, sustainability initiatives and what Michael Porter calls “shared
value”, an attempt to marry economic and social progress, this is a dispiriting
finding.
More constructively, the study shows that consumers reward brands that listen
to them, provide good quality, innovative products at fair prices; make their
lives happier, easier and healthier; and support the environment, the economy
and the community. “A new model for human prosperity is emerging, centred around
the idea of human potential and wellbeing,” Mr Haque says. That is a big
claim.
But there is nothing fluffy in the correlation between contributing to
consumers’ wellbeing and being rewarded by consumers and, in turn, by investors.
Mr Haque wants to use the data to derive a new financial metric, the “price to
wellbeing ratio”. Executives may massage earnings, he notes, but “you can’t
massage meaning”.
That might even be a way for the marketing community to convince
penny-pinching procurement executives it can still be meaningful.
2 comments:
Hi Jonath
Nice to read through the info shared here!
But I'm quiet confused that why does a business prefer to move with a PR firm or any other marketing/advertising agencies if they don't care about vast majority of brands?
Anyway, I found the blog to be a modified one that has helped me to depict a different view of what I was having.
Thanks for sharing it!
Surprised to know that the world's leading brand and a reputed concern "Apple" has been slow-witted on comparing the co-player "Samsung" that has got the top 5 positions. The possibility remains to be peppy.
Such a fruitful information keeps up the branding mode!
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