64 percent of the people surveyed indicated that they would care if the retail company went out of business. The study, conducted by Havas, surveyed more than 300,000 people over 34 countries, and featured more than 1,000 brands. Price isn’t the only portion of the Meaningful Brand matrix. It includes the quality of life associated with the brand, the company’s role in the community, what the brand contributes to a healthy life style and a person’s self-esteem.
Dominique Delport, global managing director of Havas Media Group said “This year, we’ve tackled one of the big issues for our industry. If meaningfulness is so crucial, how do you measure and create it in a way that CEOs can buy into, and marketers can evaluate? Our 2015 project pulls in data that spans across stock market, share of wallet and marketing KPIs enabling CEOs and CMOs to work together and crack the code to meaningfulness.”
The, so called, ‘share of wallet’ matrix was used to calculate what percentage of any given households expended income was spent with a particular brand. For the brands higher on the list this means an expenditure of 46 percent more on these brands. Furthermore, these companies have proven to outperform others in the stock market, growing at almost double the rate.
It has been noted, that it is no longer a case of simply ensuring the quality of a product to make it successful, “People want to connect their lives to brands that make it possible for us to live well and consume better, and that takes commitment to relationship building,” said Paul Frampton, chief executive and head of clients strategy at Havas Media. “Today’s brand valuations are more likely to be built on customer loyalty than brand equity and we see that the ‘citizen consumer’ believes this to be true too.”
“Meaningful brands are not only likely to gain purchase preference, loyalty and share of expenditure they’re also more trusted, even in brand agnostic markets like the UK and Germany. Business models can’t be built on efficiency, scale or quality alone any longer. Meaningful Brands have momentum for the future. But today only 7 percent of brands in Europe are seen to make a positive contribution to people’s quality of life – the opportunity is there for many more to seize.” Frampton also commented.
While globally, technology companies are at the top of this meaningful brands, there is still a polar gap from country to country. Take Asia, for example, 60 percent of the people care about their brands; this is 10 percent higher than anywhere else in the world. This gives developing Asian markets an added advantage.
