Brands have formed an inevitable part of our lives. And while those working in the marketing industry might expect to have a big impact on consumer’s lives, the recent Meaningful Brands survey for 2017 by Havas Group, reports otherwise.
Currently 75% of the consumers expect brands to make a significant contribution to their lives, only 40% believe brands are doing so.
The study highlighted that most consumers would not care if 74% of brands disappeared from their lives.
According to the report, content delivered by brands is under performing to a large extent. While 84% of the people expect brands to produce content, the same consumers are of the opinion that 60% of all content created by brands is poor, irrelevant or fails to deliver. Therefore, the sentiment amongst consumers is quite skeptical.
In this midst of this situation, where brands across most industries have failed to make a powerful impact on consumers lives, content for the travel industry showed a positive trajectory. Travel was more highly ranked for content effectiveness with 47% of consumers associating the travel industry with effective content such as customer support and social media sharing.
Conversely, 71% of all content produced by retail is considered to be poor, irrelevant or failing to deliver. The research also demonstrates that, although seen as a minor content provider, people want Healthcare brands to create more inspiration and entertainment led content.
While over the past ten years the highest performing brands have been dominated by the tech sector, this year the most meaningful brands ranking is dominated by the top Internet brands. Last year the top spot was held by Samsung. The rankings are based by comparing the strength of brand association to different content types of content, plus the performance of content created by the brand.
This year’s top ten performing “meaning brands” include:
- PayPal
- YouTube
- Samsung
- Mercedes Benz
- Nivea
- Microsoft
- Ikea
- Lego
Terming the results as a “wake-up” call, Yannick Bollore, CEO Havas Group, revealed the two new statistical facts that came to the forefront are content’s critical role in creating brands which are meaningful to people and the underperformance in this area.
“These results give us the same kind of wake-up call we delivered back in 2008 when we demonstrated that most people wouldn’t care if 74% of brands disappeared. For 2017 we see two new statistical facts: content’s critical role in creating brands which are meaningful to people and the under performance in this area,” Bollore said.
The study was panned across 33 countries with 300,000 people and 1,500 brands to measure content effectiveness.
