As marketers, we would love to believe that everyone is as passionate about our brand as we are. After all, we live and breathe it every single day. It’s easy to get tunnel vision.
That’s why a study like Meaningful Brands is important. This immense report by Havas Group studies 1500 global brands, 300,000 people in 33 countries across 15 different industry sectors. It offers some great perspective, into how much a brand truly means to a consumers’ life.
And to wake us up to the fact that very few brands hold any meaning whatsoever.
For example, consumers won’t care if 74% of the brands they use just ceased to exist completely. And 60% of content currently being produced by brands is seen as poor, irrelevant or failing to deliver.
How’s that for a reality check?
The definition of a meaningful brand in the study is one that offers functional benefits while offering personal benefits to a consumer and collective benefits to the community at large.
Tech brands dominated the Top 10 best performing brands with Google taking the top spot. The rest are PayPal, WhatsApp, YouTube, Samsung, Mercedes Benz, Nivea, Microsoft, Ikea and Lego.
We all probably use more than one of these brands’ products on a daily basis so they clearly these brands have the capacity to improve our lives. And they are rewarded for doing so.
Meaningful Brands outperform the stock market by an astounding 206%. They also gain increases to wallet-share by up to 9 times and ensure up to 137% greater returns on KPIs.
Content plays a large role in creating meaningfulness.
Great content is a great driver of personal wellbeing and therefore, meaningfulness. 84% of people expect brands to provide content that educates, tells stories, provides solutions and creates experiences and events.
A tall order for branded content but with great rewards – the correlation between how a brand performs on improving personal wellbeing and the strength of its content is 71%.
It’s the age of information overload
These findings confirm what we already sort of suspect- people don’t really care. There’s an overload of information out there. To stand out a brand needs to create meaning in people’s lives. And that is easier said than done.
In addition to offering a useful product, the 2016 Edelman Brand Relationship Index found that consumers have a pretty demanding list of expectations.
Brands should:
1. Help solve societal issues
2. Share a strong story
3. Listen to them
4. Respond to consumers’ needs
