The Brand Popularity Contest: who won in 2010?

Bloomberg’s Businessweek announced the findings this week of their giant annual survey into brand popularity. Now presented online at Businessweek.com and in the current double issue on news-stands, is the a-z of brand categories and who won Miss/Mr Popularity in 2010.

To explain their rationale behind this, a quote from their front page:

“Even in our present era of 10,000 niches, mass customization, and the “long tail”—of companies selling fewer items from a far vaster inventory—we are, arguably, governed more than ever by what’s popular. Thanks to the Internet’s ability to rank everything, one can dwell almost exclusively in the world of trending Twitter topics, of top-reviewed restaurants, of Amazon.com bestselling books, of the cutest cute-cat YouTube videos. News sites all feature tallies of the Most Read, Most E-mailed, and Most Commented On articles—creating a self- reinforcing conversation.

Is all this popularity data enriching us, or does it obscure new paths of discovery? Are crowds wise, or do they follow the pack and middle-of-the-road? A deep dive into what’s totally beast, right now—not just the bestselling, but the fastest-selling; not merely the market leaders, but the ones gaining the most market share—proves that while there’s no accounting for taste, the data can be helpful and even inspiring. It highlights huge, wealth-creating opportunities as well as under-appreciated ways that cash flows to the sublime.”

Every entry in the list represents either a market leader or “the person, product, or trend that experienced the greatest commercial growth or surge in popularity during 2010.” Some figures are literal (e.g. Nordstrom’s revenue, $9.7 billion), and others symbolic (the rpms of the top-selling turntable, 33⅓).

Anyhoo, for me it made for fascinating reading. Some not wholly surprising – those we could have predicted include Kate Middleton as top choice for magazine front covers and Harry Potter for top move franchise. And I was particularly amused by the inclusion of ‘Car (stolen)’ as a category (the Honda Accord, if you were wondering). Remember this is only representative of the US market, but still a curious list.

So for your delight (and with thanks to Brand Channel this morning), a selection of the list:

• Actress: Sandra Bullock

• Athlete (Female): Serena Williams

• Athlete (Male): Peyton Manning

• Beverage (Beer): Bud Light

• Beverage (Soda): Coca-Cola

• Beverage (Sports): Gatorade

• Cable TV Show: MTV’s Jersey Shore

• Car (Electric): Nissan Leaf

• Car (Stolen): Honda Accord

• Cereal: Honey Nut Cheerios

• Chocolate: M&Ms

• Cigarette: Marlboro

• Coffee: Nescafe

• Credit Card: Visa

• Department Store: Nordstrom

• Diet: Gluten-Free

• E-Reader: Kindle

• Game System: Microsoft’s Xbox Kinect

• Gum: Orbit

• Jeans: Levi’s 501

• Magazine Cover Subject: Kate Middleton

• Model (highest paid): Giselle

• Movie Franchise: Universal’s Harry Potter

• Museum Exhibit: Alexander McQueen at the Met

• Music (album sales): Adele

• Newspaper: The Wall Street Journal

• Philanthropists: Bill & Melinda Gates

• Razor (Female): Gillette Venus

• Snack (Cookie): Oreo

• Sport: NBA

 

Karl Lagerfeld hits the (Diet Coke) bottle

How cute is this?

Favourite soft drink partnering with epic design talent. And before you brush this off as just another brand exercise reaching its target market (though bravo Coca-Cola on that front too), it may interest you to know that Lagerfeld actually has more of a tangible link with the brand than the dollar paid to slap his image and signature on a Diet Coke bottle.

Back in 2005, rumour had it that his slimming techniques have centered around dedicated consumption of the soft drink. That and horse meat. Yum. But fair play to the guy – he shifted 90 pounds apparently. I’ve also just discovered that so thrilled was the fashion mogul with his achievement, he even authorized the publication of his insights in a book, aptly if unimaginatively named The Karl Lagerfeld Diet.

And, like every established fashionista, he naturally employed staff to fulfil his every whim. During a break in a New York fashion shoot in 2008, a butler was seen delivering a goblet of his miracle juice to see him through the final half an hour (thanks to Towelroad for this tidbit):

(via Mordechai Rubinstein on flickr)

Sadly for us UK folk, the little beauties above are only available in Paris, from Colette. A snip at 60 Euros. Though if you did want to put Lagerfeld’s diet theories to the test, the standard 330ml can multi-packs might work out a bit more economical.

Regardless of what you think about his methods, you can’t fault the guy for his honesty. When asked why he dieted in the first place, he replied:

“It was for totally superficial reasons that I got started on this diet.

I think that fashion is the healthiest motivation for losing weight.”

Bravo brand, bravo brand ambassador.

Landmark decision to lift ban on television product placement

I have been meaning to post on the product placement horrors in one of my fave US teen dramas 90210 for some time, and that post is still forthcoming – but in the meantime, a quick update on recent developments in that area for the UK broadcast market.

Ever in the shadow of its more commercially open American cousin, the British broadcasting industry has always been hampered by government guidelines restricting product placement on our TV screens. Not for much longer.

Under new legislation announced by the Government on 9 February, product placement will be allowed in UK terrestrial television programmes. In his statement, Culture, Media and Sport Secretary Ben Bradshaw said that maintaining a ban on television product placement would “jeopardise the competitiveness” of UK programme makers “at a time when this crucial part of our creative industries needs all the help we can give it.”

This decision follows the introduction of the Audiovisual Media Regulations 2009 on 19 December 2009, which allowed some product placement in ‘on-demand’ television and television-like services.  However, until this week’s Government announcement, there were no exceptions to the prohibition on television product placement. The question of television product placement has proved a contentious issue, with many stakeholders expressing concerns about the potential adverse impact on the editorial independence of broadcasters and on viewers’ trust in what they see on television. The strength of opinion is evident in that the Government received almost 1480 responses during its recent consultation.

For this reason, the Government has decided to “proceed with caution” and has decided to introduce further safeguards beyond those set out in the AVMS Regulations 2009. Products and services such as alcohol, food and drinks high in fat, salt and sugar (HFSS), infant follow-on milk and gambling will all be excluded from the new product placement rules, and BBC licence funded programmes will also remain unaffected.

Further, it is significant that the new rules will not take effect immediately, as the Government want to give Ofcom the opportunity to run a public consultation and make detailed changes to its Code. However, it is anticipated that shows including product placement will be being shown on terrestrial TV by the end of the year, in what could herald a new era for television advertising and broadcasting.

Watch out for a pint of the black stuff being ordered in the Old Vic this side of Christmas.

Coca-Cola vs. Pepsi: it’s always the real thing…

Marketing Week today issued a story revealing the latest brands to top Brand Finance’s Global 500 list of the world’s most valuable brands.

Wal-Mart topped the bill, if you’re interested, bumping incumbent Coca-Cola from the top spot, which the soft drinks giant had held since research began in 2007.

But it was the Coke vs. Pepsi battle that caught my eye:

It’s not all bad news for Coke, however. It is still the dominant beverage brand on the list. While Coca-Cola’s total enterprise value of $104.5bn (£71.2bn) is just 22% greater than that of Pepsi (which is 21st in the table), the Coke brand is 118% more valuable than its arch-rival.

What exactly makes a brand more ‘valuable’ than another is another post entirely, but the above should at least introduce you to the difference between a brand’s market or enterprise value (financially) and its commercial value in comparison to its rival(s).

But what this reminded me of in the main, was a fun little experiment that I have been meaning to post for a while, that I extracted from Rob Walker‘s excellent work on the relationship between who people are and what they buy, Buying In. Walker was writing just last year, but for some time prior, traditional advertising methods were well on the way to being usurped by their younger digitally native upstart cousins in the social media space – invoking mass fear across the industry that brands and branding in the traditional sense no longer held the sway they once did.

So, taking the world’s biggest Superbrand (as it was then) and its arch rival, Pepsi, scientists at the Baylor College of Medicine put brand loyalty to the test amongst the disenchanted, anti-establishment student population. The results were, I thought quite remarkable.

First, they conducted the classic blind taste test – white-labelled, un-branded Pepsi vs. white-labelled, un-branded Coke. Unsurprisingly, given the very similar ingredients, the split was more or less half and half (with a slight slant in favour of Pepsi).

In the second round however, the subject had to choose between a labelled can (Pepsi for some, Coke for others) and an unlabelled one. Properly labelled, Pepsi again finished in a tie with its unknown competitor. But Coke on the other hand was by far the decisive favourite above its mystery rival.

And here’s the twist. In this second round, subjects were told that the unlabeled drink might be Pepsi or it might be Coke. In reality, the labeled drink was always  competing against itself. Thus, branded Coke totally trounced its unbranded self . Bizarre.

And when we look at the neurology behind it (courtesy of BrandChannel.com), we actually get scientific proof of brand impact. Ready? Here comes the science bit:

When Montague gave a taste of an unnamed soda to his volunteers he found that more people preferred Pepsi. On the scan images the ventral putamen, one of the brain’s reward centers, had a response that was five times stronger than for people who preferred Coke.

The shock came when Read repeated the experiment, this time telling volunteers which brand they were tasting. Nearly all the subjects then said they preferred the Coke. Moreover, different parts of the brain fired as well, especially the medial prefrontal cortex, an area associated with thinking and judging. Without a doubt the subjects were letting their experience of the Coke brand influence their preferences.

The work of Montague and other studies prove that branding goes far beyond images and memory recall. The medial prefrontal cortex is a part of the brain known to be involved in our sense of self. It fires in response to something — an image, name or concept — that resonates with who we are. Something clicks, and we are more likely to buy.

 Brand immunity? We’re not there yet.

And while we’re on the subject of the big red machine, take a look at their 2006 – most successful ever – advertising campaign, The Happiness Factory(click on the screenshot below to view). It’s fab. So fab, that they they are now rolling out a multi-player game version of the concept as an iPhone application – on top of the interactive sitealready online. Brilliant.