The battle of the brands 2: new global brand survey just more deck shuffling.

There's nothing very surprising in BusinessWeek's annual survey of the 100 Best Global Brands, just that Google isn't already closer to the top of the pack and that it pre-empts the rapid decline of some world's major financial brands.

In its latest and eigth iteration, the brand rankings compiled from data from JPMorgan Chase, Citigroup and Morgan Stanley, see little shift in the dominance of global brands with the exception of Disney's failure to grow, Mercedes-Benz departure (down to 11) replaced by Google's (10) much anticipated entry into the top ten.

What's most interesting in this list is the fact that $157 billion Google hasn't already surpassed Microsoft (ranked 3) and that Swedish megaclothing retailer H&M is rocketing up the charts(22) while Thomson Reuters (44), Blackberry (73), Ferrari (93), Armani (94), FedEx (99) and Visa (100) are all marked as new entrants to the pantheon.

Behind Google, Apple (24, up from 33), Sap (31, from 34), Nintendo (40, from 44) and Amazon (50, up 62) all signalled significant growth off the back of strong sales and increasingly focussed efforts of true and marked differentiation via technology.

In what must have anticipated the seismic shocks in financial markets, big value declines were posted by Merril Lynch (-12%) Citi (-14%) and Morgan Stanley (-16%), while old school brands such as Ford (-12%), Gap (-20%) and Motorola (-10%) all struggled to hold onto their market and customer relevance.

Outside of the financial giants, Ford, Gap and Motorola have all been characterised as so bogged down in moribund cultures that their ability to innovate has had significant effects on their share price and caused subsequent declines in brand value.

Indeed for Ford, Gap and Motorola it must signal that lessons can be learnt, not from big ticket investing in advertising but in building cultures that are imbued by technological and design innovation, which big risers Google, H&M, Amazon and Zara already know.

What drives Booz's brand analytics tool?

Booz&co have ventured into the small but under-estimated brand valuation market with the launch of a brand vitality assessment tool designed to help failing brands redefine themselves..

The announcement comes off the back of Millward Brown's recent alliance with Brazil’s leading brand valuation consultancy, Brand Analytics, designed to complement its Optimor evaluation and measurement products in the South America market.

It also signals the tendency for global brand and business consultancies to merge strategy and engagement with valuation and analytics off the back of increasing client demands for transparency and justification in spend.

In the latest issue of Strategy and Business, Booz&co cite the success of revitalized brands like Abercrombie & Fitch, Johnnie Walker, Olay, and Ford’s Mustang as evidence that the success or otherwise of brand revitalisation and brand extension has been traditionally driven by "instinct and an appetite for risk".

Booz claims its new tool kit provides "data-driven analytics" to minimize the risk associated with these kinds of decisions. Called the Brand Vitality Assessment (BVA) and sounding much like Y&R's Brand Asset Valuation (BAV), it says it examines every aspect of a brand including communications strategy, pricing and the state of its competitors to reveal how much life is left in the name.

Booz's BVA is supposed to help companies "identify latent value — or the lack thereof — in their product portfolios before deciding what to do" or in other words, what the brand equity is. No surprises here and hardly different from their competitors.

Booz's BVA process is based on a brand having what they describe as "residual strengths" such as brand associations, the potential for or meaningful differentiation on at least one purchase driver and basic distribution infrastructure to support the revitalization.

It uses four related evaluations that incorporate consumer (where hoping that B2B hasn't been ignored here) research to create a holistic and data-driven view of how the brand is currently performing in the marketplace.

The evaluations seem fairly qualitative rather than quantitative and Booz is unable to cite any examples of what kind of measures are actually made and what kind of data is produced. Further, they don't provide any evidence of any brands they have worked with that have employed quantitative measures but apply only market share figures as demonstrations of how the process works.

The four evaluations appear almost entirely qualitative. They are:

1. The Purchase Funnel Assessment (PFA) is just another way to evaluate the purchase decision process and from DIFFUSION's experience this is generally qualitative as it relies on customer assessment from awareness to point of purchase.

2. The Brand Equity Review (BER) is designed measure residual brand equity and loyalty within the target customer segment. While it might identify the brand’s attributes, one would think these would be known and those attributes which have been eroded or been rendered irrelevant by competitors, again this seems more qualitative measure.

3. Competitive Dynamics Assessment (CDA) is a look at which competitors are taking away market share, why, and how easily the problems could be rectified.

4. Value Proposition Check (VPC, I suppose) analyses the brand’s benefits including marketing communications and pricing. It includes standard brand attributes and benefits check built around the functional, emotional and expressive against consumer, competitor, and internal perspectives. Nothing new here.

Booz's so-called Brand Vitality Potential (let's call it BVP and not sure how it snuck in) is the final evaluation, where the "cold hard facts, as uncovered by the previous four analyses, come into play". I guess this is where we might see some numbers.

Booz says the BVA is "not a panacea for tired brands" but that it offers is "a rigorous, data-driven approach to deciding a brand’s future" except we don't know what the real data is except it's all qualitative.

Booz could do well to state whether any other quantitative measurements are being used such as total market shares, sales by segment against overall PE ratios and how these are applied by the BVA. What scoring tools will be used? How will one tool be used against another? What are the weightings? If any?

More importantly, how will the assessment be reported and by whom and within what framework, particularly from the point of view of brand stretch and brand extension.

Then there are the issues of brand redefinition, activation and engagement, which follow on from such work. Booz and for that matter few other consultancies, have little capability or experience doing this kind of work despite talking about it and claiming it. The article cites no projects they have worked on this area, just suppose sos.

That there are so few consultancies and their clients who have undertaken these kind of complete lifecycle projects following a brand valuation, says much about the the general market wlllingness to understand the process behind brand creation and to make the actual investment required to revitalise dormant brands as it does about the abilities of the consultancies they use. The one's who have done it and been successful have obviously understood this from the outset.

Image courtesy of Chronicle Books.

Assume the position: branding in 2008

2008 marks the death of “fact free” brand decision making and branding programs as business looks for return on investment. Business will start to get that brand value needs to be understood, measured and acted on. Australian businesses are under increasing pressure to understand and evaluate how their brands impact their bottom lines. Responsibility will start to shift out of marketing departments and into corporate strategy. We will see a move away from a reliance on traditional empiric and historical research models to the use of brand analytics that are forward looking and provide prescriptions for responsible corporate action.

Here’s how we see this shift happening:
Any brand activity can now be subjected to massive and organised digital surveillance. Companies will soon get the idea that their brands and reputations need to be both guarded and monitored. BRAND MONITORING has exploded in the US, particularly amongst digital brands and within the online activity of all brands, and in turn companies will look for more sophisticated ways to measure and understand brand effects in the market.

To do this they’ll need to ratify brand value using BRAND ANALYTICS. It might better be called Brand Valuation 2.0 but it goes well beyond the balance sheet. Analytics creates predictive models around how to build brand value, and how to provide better and more insightful answers to business questions around demand, brand and performance.

Once they get a handle on both brand activity and value they will see that traditional BRAND POSITIONING IS DEAD and move to the new DYNAMIC POSITIONING models. Defining brands to capture a point in a marketplace presupposes that markets and customers are static and clearly defined. It’s a machine age view. We’ll need to throw out the USP along with the single fixed brand idea. Today’s brands need to be dynamic entities, given both direction and momentum, and allowed to change within markets.

While no one says brand identity guidelines are about to be abandoned (after all someone has to define physical and functional attributes of the brand), there will be more reliance placed on BRAND PORTFOLIO MANAGEMENT approaches using BRAND ENGAGEMENT across all stakeholders. It’s not enough to know the touch point, you need to know how to manage the interaction to ensure the integrity of the response and consequent action. This is going to even be even more important as stakeholders push for more meaningful corporate social responsibility programs.

Challenging old notions that corporations own themselves, the concept of the SOCIAL OWNERSHIP OF CORPORATIONS will become a marker for a much larger trend. CSR will increasingly become an element of brand vision and strategy. Business will have no choice but to become more transparent, more comfortable in its own skin, less inclined to communicate through stage managed campaigns and communications and ultimately begin to acknowledge their part in the fabric of the world.

image copyright Keith Haring

Return on influence: metrics and measurement for brands in social media.

One of the emerging dynamics of social media is the compelling need for companies and organisations interested in tracking their brand, positioning, reputation and saliency within this space is to have some way of measuring return on both investment and influence.

Many organisations want to be able to measure their involvement or even assess potential returns prior to investment but are slowly coming to the realisation that traditional web-based analytics alone are not going to do the job, so the next question is crucial – what and how should be measured?

The crux of the issue is that regardless of the success of brand monitoring companies like Neilsen BuzzMetrics and TNS Media Intelligence/Cymfony, at this point in history their work is both highly speculative and also completely unique to the interpretation of the entity doing the measuring.

While the ability to track the tone, perception and nuances of discussions around a company and its brands, either via social media or even within it, cannot be achieved through web metrics or traditional advertisement measurement alone, the real problem is that even among the eight or so market leaders Forrester Research identified last year, there is no universally agreed standard upon which to base either measurement and metrics.

Certainly, the measurement attributes identified by Factiva, one of the vendors included in the Forrester study, could likely be considered to be part of any brand monitoring mix but this mix is also likely to be far more dynamic than anticipated.

Last year Factiva tried to get an understanding of the prevailing thinking, hosting a roundtable of influential bloggers and social media critics which identified the following measurement attributes (I've left out explanations of those that need no explanation):

1. Analytics and activity

2. Community activation/call to action

3. The "Conversation Index", define as the ratio between blog posts and comments-plus-trackbacks. This attribute is one subset of measuring participation and engagement but when I look at the majority of external corporate blogs alongside trackbacks and comments even in our brand sector, the actual ratio is low.

4. Demographic/s

5. Influential ideas or memes which the "intensity" or "velocity" of the spread of an idea or message over time. (A "meme" refers to an idea or discussion that grows and spreads from individual to individual into a lengthy chain of commentary. Rather like an idea train.)

6. Participation and engagement, where a recipient not only responds to a message but acts on it as well.

7. Reach, where it’s a lot less to do with sheer numbers than with influence.

8. Relationships and connections. For example, Factiva’s panel noted that a blogger may have a large, diverse audience but he or she may not have an intimate relationship with specific influential individuals within any given community.

9. Relevance, the question being how relevant to my company is a particular blog post among hundreds of a given meme?

10. Sentiment/tone/favourability

11. Content: the focus of coverage of social media. In most cases, this means a narrow, but extremely detailed focus on one subject or issue and it explains the importance of certain blogs over others within their respective niches.

Factiva’s panel concluded that to be successful companies need to use a combination of several key measurement attributes to understand and drive their own social media success for internal and external stakeholders.

Brand monitoring companies need to be able to help clients develop and execute plans which monitor and measure these changing attributes within a specific context and within a sphere of operations. Brand agencies then need to able to be bipartisan and develop strategy that acknowledges both measurement and metrics are dynamic and that a company's ability to identify those key attributes important to it might actually be limited. Setting these against a wider brand context and against other metrics might be another way of helping to define their brand influence.