BLOG

How to Define Your Verbal Branding Strategy

Voice, naming and nomenclature all factor into making choices with the most potential.

In today’s digital, always-on world, words are an increasingly powerful currency for brands to create real-time value and demonstrate relevance.

But finding the right words—and using them effectively—requires rigor and structure. Deploying a thoughtful verbal branding strategy (sometimes called a verbal identity) can help bridge your brand strategy to in-market execution through content, communications and experiences.

From finding the right voice, to building equity in key messages, to creating a methodical approach to portfolio naming, a clear verbal strategy can empower writers, marketers and sales teams with centralized ways to create cohesive, connected communications. Which, when done right, have the power to influence opinion, shift perceptions and ultimately help drive business growth.

Defining Your Verbal Branding Strategy

Strategic Naming

Simply put, names are one of the quickest ways for brands to tell their stories. A great name provides a glimpse into what a brand stands for and gives audiences a preview of the experience to come. And while good names can come from anywhere, the best ones are just as strategic as they are creative. Taking an art and science approach to naming ensures names not only signal a compelling story but also connect back to their strategy.

Before ideating names, it’s important to get strategically grounded by thinking through questions like:

  • What should my new name communicate about my business or product?
  • What should it signal for the future?
  • How will my audiences interact with the name? And where?
  • How can I avoid naming trends to create an enduring, evergreen name?
  • How can my name help me stand out in my category?

And because naming is inherently an emotional, subjective process, it’s key to align on these questions at the outset with all relevant stakeholders and decision-makers and bring them along for what will surely be an iterative process.

Nomenclature

But while most organizations aren’t naming or re-naming their company or hero product every day, almost all organizations are tasked with managing product, service or feature naming.

This is particularly true in today’s world of mergers, acquisitions and rapid innovation, where portfolios across categories have become complex and inconsistent, ultimately creating a confusing customer experience.

Nomenclature, also known as Naming Systems or Naming Architecture, allows brands to create order and hierarchy across their portfolios to provide internal clarity around offerings and how they work together as a whole. This creates a more simplified way for customers to better navigate a brand’s breadth of offerings, ultimately driving choice.

At Prophet, we take a considered, strategic approach to nomenclature that ensures existing portfolio names are optimized and streamlined, while also providing clear systems and constructs for creating new names. This creates efficiencies in naming and managing names internally while providing a system for growing and evolving portfolio names in the future.

Brand Voice

Just like people, brands also have unique personalities, styles and quirks that define their behaviors and relationships. Brand voice is the art of conveying that personality through how its people write and speak.

By using a distinct voice consistently across touchpoints, brands are able to make connections, strengthen relationships and build loyalty and affinity over time. Brand voice can also help you stand out and grab attention in a crowded or commoditized category. But creating a voice isn’t just a creative exercise—it’s also a strategic one. To be truly successful, your voice should be rooted in your brand strategy and organizational DNA, optimized for your industry, and reflective of your customers’ needs and attitudes.

“A clear verbal strategy can empower writers, marketers and sales teams with centralized ways to create cohesive, connected communications.”

But while your voice is a hardworking asset, simplicity and utility are key to successful execution. We recommend avoiding “attribute soup” and boiling your voice down to just 2-3 core components. If you were tasked with writing, say, a piece that must be Trusted, Friendly, Insightful, Bold, and Engaging—would you know where to start? Instead, try to identify the main hallmarks of your voice, and distill them into a persona and 2-3 directive principles that give your writers a clearer understanding of what “right” sounds like.

Messaging

Now, onto messaging. First things first, messaging themes aren’t copy—they guide copy. As high-level communications points, they can be dialed up and down across communications and adapted for different audiences—ensuring a flexible, cohesive expression, rather than a static, repetitive one.

Because messaging should help convey your strategy, your positioning or value proposition should be your starting point for developing your messages. If you don’t have that in place, you can still derive messages by thinking about the intersection between what your brand wants to say, and what your audience wants to hear—leaving room for how you’ll grow and evolve in the near future.

By prioritizing those ideas down to a focused set, you can bolster them with proof points, keywords or phrases that help writers and marketers bring them to life.

It can be easy to see how voice and messaging come to life in high-impact touchpoints like advertising or your website, but it’s equally, if not more important, to use these tools in more functional touchpoints, like customer service call center scripts and chatbots, so that on-strategy voice and messaging becomes an integral part of the entire customer experience.

Finally, don’t forget employee touchpoints. A compelling approach to voice and messaging can go a long way towards shaping internal communications and experiences that keep employees feeling engaged, informed, and inspired to live the brand more fully.

Reimagine
Brands

RELATED SERVICE

FINAL THOUGHTS

Defining your verbal branding strategy is a critical step in creating your brand expression. Once these assets are defined, make sure to bring them to life through steps like training and global adaptation. Because when done right and put in the hands of your marketers, your verbal branding strategy is a critical asset, connecting the dots between your strategy and expression, and shaping how your audiences perceive, engage with, and choose your brand going forward.

Learn more about using verbal branding to express your brand and business strategy.

CONNECT WITH US

VIDEO

Bernhard Schaar: The Importance of Brand Relevance

Relevance matters more, and differentiation counts for less. Here’s what’s behind the shift.

2 min

Summary

Bernhard Schaar, an associate partner at Prophet, talks about how to create a relentlessly relevant brand. He lists the four key dimensions that make up brand relevance: pragmatism, innovation, inspiration and customer obsession, as well as offers advice to companies to increase their brands’ relevance.

One important thing to note, according to Schaar, is that digital is an opportunity that can be utilized along all four of these key dimensions. From social media to artificial intelligence, Prophet can help to support these areas of growth in brand relevance.

Learn more about the importance of brand relevance for business growth.

VIDEO

Clive Rohald: Inside the Living Brand Experience

That means focusing on agile and dynamic design systems, and modern representations of brands.

2 min

Summary

Clive Rohald, Executive Director and Partner at Prophet, shares what we mean by the term ‘living brand’ and why creative teams today need to move towards more agile, responsive systems. When it comes to design, it isn’t just about a specific color palette, or how the logo looks – it’s more about the interaction and how a brand fulfills a need or gap in your life.

Becoming a living brand is no longer an opportunity, but an obligation in order for brands to stay relevant to consumers. That being said, this strategic shift must not only be made but also maintained in order to remain a relevant brand year after year.

Learn more about how you can start to make this shift in your brand strategy.

VIDEO

UBS Digital Portrait Gallery

See the continuous animated drawings we made for UBS, capturing its entire history in a single-line.

10 min

Summary

Try telling the 156-year story of the world’s largest wealth management firm in a simple yet engaging way, it sure isn’t easy. Prophet built this dynamic and digital portrait gallery for UBS, which now takes centre stage at its newly renovated HQ in Zurich.

A continuous single-line of animated drawings, it captures their pioneering leadership, progression and iconic moments in an elegant and arresting way.

Learn about our other work with UBS: https://prophet.com/case-studies/ubs/.

VIDEO

Setting Your Healthcare Business Up for Success

Drugs and devices are important. But holistic solutions bring brand, digital and patient experience in, too.

3 min

How Can You Set Your Healthcare Business Up for Success?

The healthcare industry is continually changing, which makes succeeding hard, so how can your organisation or brands win? Fred Geyer, a Senior Partner at Prophet, shares the importance of bringing digital innovation, patient experience, and brand together in order to create better solutions and cost efficiencies. The relevance of the device or treatment is important, but it’s now about incorporating it effectively into the larger system and creating an experience, that will set winning brands apart.

Learn more about how you can succeed in the healthcare industry, by creating a winning brand.

VIDEO

The Importance of Brand Relevance for Healthcare Organisations

From distinctive inspiration to relentless pragmatism, our relevance research offers healthcare insights.

2 min

Why is Brand Relevance Important to Healthcare Organisations?

Healthcare organisations are struggling to keep their finger on the relevance pulse. Results from the Prophet Brand Relevance Index® show that the NHS and other healthcare providers are lacking in the innovation stakes and are falling behind when it comes to aspects of the patient experience. Fred Geyer, Senior Partner at Prophet, offers advice on where these organisations should be focusing their efforts in order to drive relevance and unlock business growth.

Learn more about how to develop brand relevance as a healthcare organization by consistently improving upon patient experience.

VIDEO

How to Help Your Business Counter Market Disruption

As disruptors have grown into dominators, they continue to flex muscles that come from customer obsession.

3 min

How Can You Help Your Business Counter Market Disruption?

From disruption to domination. Spotify, Netflix and Fitbit all feature in the top 10 of our latest UK Brand Relevance Index. What’s interesting is that each one of them is a start-up and each one has disrupted an entire industry, but it’s one thing to be a disruptive business start-up, and another to turn that disruption into an established global business. In the meantime, those large traditional players that used to be the leaders 50, 100, even 20 years ago, are fast losing their relevance. Tosson El Noshokaty, Partner & EMEA Regional Lead at Prophet, shares his thoughts on how traditional players can keep up, and the long-term strategies needed in order to successfully compete and remain relevant to consumers.

Learn more about the UK’s most relevant brands and how they’ve remained relevant to consumers: https://relevantbrands-2018.prophet.com/united-kingdom/

PODCAST

How Brands Are Built

34 min

He’s been called “The Father of Modern Branding.” If you’ve ever read anything about branding or brand strategy, my guest today requires no introduction. I’m talking to David Aaker, author of over a dozen books and hundreds of articles about marketing and branding, Professor Emeritus at the Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, and Vice-Chair at Prophet, a global marketing and branding consultancy.

Given this season is about positioning and brand platforms, I couldn’t pass up the opportunity to ask David directly about his brand vision model, which most people refer to simply as “the Aaker Model.” We also talked about two of his most recent books, some of his favorite brands, a few books, and his advice for junior people in the branding industry.

Listen to the podcast.

Reimagine
Brands

RELATED SERVICE

BLOG

A Content Strategy Framework for the Evolved Enterprise

Super-detailed content programming and a sincere commitment to test-and-learn thinking result in higher impact.

Figuring out how to do enterprise content well is no small undertaking. Often, there’s a lot of experimentation and one-off initiatives that don’t reach their intended audiences and are not conclusively worth the effort and investment.

In 2016, Altimeter analyst Omar Akhtar and digital partner Mat Zucker published the report, “Key Elements of a Unified Content Strategy.” The research aimed to help companies jump-start their content strategy development. Findings recommend prioritizing audiences and selecting one of five content archetypes that can serve them best.

5 Simple Steps to an Effective Content Strategy

Since then, we’ve built on the methodologies based on various needs of clients across industries. We’ve developed a framework and 5 simple steps to help companies tackle the hairiest content challenges and create a modern, effective content strategy.

1. Get Your Brand On 

Content is a powerful way to activate a brand strategy. It can help build awareness, engage audiences, and highlight how various brand levers are being received. We recommend anchoring on the brand’s purpose, promise and principles to connect diverse content needs back to the business. Your company story or mission could act as a proxy.

Establishing 3-5 key messaging themes is important to your strategic communications. A messaging strategy ensures teams are collectively covering key messages and clarifies ownership of messaging areas. They help marketers understand which of their messages resonate with audiences.  Messaging themes may be tailored for execution, may change by year, but are foundational for content.

2. Commit to Business Value

A vision for content—what you need content to do inside and outside the company—helps build cohesion enterprise-wide. One of my favorites is Marriott’s “tell a story” which sparks excitement and passion to make Marriott the world’s favorite travel company. It anchors content on the brand’s mission to lead within the travel category while celebrating its audiences. For some clients, we also build content principles that create guardrails for how best to execute this vision.

“Content is a powerful way to activate a brand strategy.”

3. Tailor to Your Audience

We usually tackle 3-5 audiences at a time, building discrete content personas; identifying what each audience needs and wants as well as where and how they engage with content. For example, a corporate audience like job seekers would have very different needs from a line of business’s consumer audience. Picking a priority archetype like “Content as a Window” for job seekers, or “Content as Support” for consumers, helps teams make choices around what content to create, and keeps audience needs top of mind.

4. Get Organized

Content planning is a detail-oriented and coordinated effort. Often, various departments oversee paid, owned and earned activities, or manage disparate channels (e.g. web, social media, intranet, etc.). When teams align their efforts into shared content programs, their content is more likely to be encountered by their desired audiences and deliver value.

A content program is essentially a broad theme that meets a specific user-based need. They logically connect back to global messaging themes. A meaty program can inspire dozens of topics and experiences across paid, unpaid and earned; executing two or three programs at once can help meet multiple objectives.

Programs help guide holistic content experiences that drive the next best action. They tend to be more efficient to produce and can be linked to business impact versus a series of one-off content pieces which are less meaningful in the long run.

In early 2018, TurboTax launched “There’s Nothing to Be Afraid Of”—an integrated marketing campaign focused on Latino empowerment. TurboTax wanted to reach Hispanic audiences and help them learn more about filing their own taxes. Besides running paid ads, the effort was supported by numerous content efforts. For example, they collaborated with influential Hispanic lifestyle bloggers and experts to create authentic educational content. They also erected a Hispanic community forum on their website and prepared relevant responses to topics that came up within the community. They developed the “#taxconfessions” sweepstakes encouraging the creation of user-generated YouTube content. And, of course, much of the content was in Spanish.

As with the TurboTax example, a holistic program is comprised of several components. Topics are specific content assets that cover various aspects of a program. They could be campaign-based (e.g., time-sensitive) or evergreen. The formats that are selected will often align with the content archetype that is chosen. If your audience needs “Content as Window”, you may choose case studies or video. “Content as Support” may include more selection guidance and post-purchase onboarding materials.

5. Ready, Test, Go

Coming out of content planning, teams are armed with fleshed-out programs and a set of prioritized activities that usually fall into one of two buckets:

  1. Good test and learn opportunities (i.e., what can we execute and measure today)
  2. Worthwhile investment opportunities (i.e., >6 months)

According to a recent Content Marketing Institute report, about 90% of B2B marketers in North America were committed to content marketing, yet only 37% had documented it.

—

Sources:

*Content Marketing Institute, B2B Content Marketing, 2018 Budgets, Benchmarks and Trends – North America.

Drive
Customer
Demand

RELATED SERVICE

FINAL THOUGHTS

It’s time for all marketers to create cohesion across the enterprise and take an audience-led approach to content marketing. If your content efforts have not been paying off, it’s probably time to get hyper-focused on a few key audiences that are critical to your success and begin understanding how you can use content to deliver value to them—in a highly focused and coordinated way—throughout their journey.

Learn how Prophet is strategically helping evolved enterprises across the globe create better content strategies that provide value to their audiences, align their organization and produce measurable outcomes for growth.

Gain insight into what goes into a content strategy and how it can take your business to the next level.

CONNECT WITH US

BOOK

Making the Healthcare Shift: The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity

SCOTT DAVIS, JEFF GOURDJI

Buy Now

Summary

As the industry sits on the edge of disruption, healthcare organizations need to transform to stay relevant.

Healthcare organizations now have both the motive and means to empower, engage, equip and enable consumers. While healthcare organizations have recognized the need to change, they have struggled to get started and sustain the effort. Based on conversations with leading healthcare organizations such as Mayo Clinic, Intermountain Healthcare, Geisinger, Anthem, Aetna, Pfizer, Novartis and more, the book identifies five required shifts organizations can make to better compete in this evolving landscape.

Through case studies and practical examples, Making the Healthcare Shift provides healthcare leaders across the healthcare ecosystem with a playbook to make their organizations more consumer-centric.

“Making the Healthcare Shift: The Transformation to Consumer-Centricity” is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Google Play or wherever books are sold.

Highlights

  • Identifies the five shifts healthcare companies need to make to become more consumer-centric.
  • Offers case studies and practical advice on how to make these five shifts become a reality.
  • Reveals how traditional healthcare organizations (payers, providers, pharma companies) can prepare for the changes to come and re-invent how they engage with consumers.
  • Provides practical advice for healthcare leaders across the globe who have the fortitude to transform their organizations to both compete and win in the age of healthcare consumerism.

Endorsements

Andrew Dreyfus
Chief Executive Officer, Blue Cross Blue Shield of Massachusetts

“The time has come to put the consumer at the center of everything. Scott and Jeff offer a guide to that important change. It’s grounded in consumer relationships that are built on partnership and collaboration”

Kevin Kumler
President of Health Systems, Zocdoc

“Our partners are getting more than the technology we provide – we help healthcare organizations become more digital and agile in nature. Scott and Jeff do a great job providing practical advice on how healthcare organizations can successfully partner with digital health companies.”

David Edelman
Chief Marketing Officer, Aetna

“Living the transformation in health, I know the path is not simple” That is why it is so refreshing to see the learning Scott and Jeff have brought in an extremely useful guide for change.”

Peter Corfield
Chief Commercial Officer, Spire Healthcare, U.K.

“…This book will help healthcare leaders – in any geography – win with consumers in their markets.”

About the Authors

Scott Davis

Scott is the Chief Growth Officer of Prophet, a leading strategic growth firm.  In over 25 years of brand and marketing strategy consulting, he has worked across an array of clients, including, GE, Allstate, Hershey’s, Microsoft, Boeing, Sara Lee, NBC Universal, the NBA, Target, Gulfstream, United Airlines, the City of Chicago. His work in healthcare includes Johnson & Johnson, the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, Mayo Clinic, Novant Health and an array of provider systems in the US and across the globe. Scott is a frequent guest lecturer at MBA programs across the country and served as an adjunct professor at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. Scott is a contributing columnist at forbes.com and is the author of 3 previous books, including The Shift:  The Transformation of Today’s Marketers into Tomorrow’s Growth Leaders.

Jeff Gourdji

Jeff is a Partner and co-leader of the healthcare practice at Prophet.  With over 20 years of leading high-impact marketing & strategy projects, Jeff brings a breadth of experience that comes from working across many industries as a marketing practitioner, management consultant and political strategist. Jeff has worked extensively across the health care value chain across an array of growth challenges.  His current and past clients include Mayo Clinic, Northwestern Medicine, Encompass Health, Anthem, Eli Lilly & Company and several Blue Cross Blue Shield plans. Jeff is a frequent speaker and writer on healthcare topics and has been published or cited in Becker’s Hospital Review, Modern Healthcare, Medical Marketing & Media (MM&M), PM 360 and the Chicago Tribune. Jeff received his B.A. from the University of Michigan and his M.B.A. from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business.

Connect

Want to speak to Scott or Jeff about how to become more consumer-centric? Contact us today.

Identify
Growth
Pathways

RELATED SERVICE

BLOG

Which Brands Truly Inspire? The 2018 Prophet Brand Relevance Index®

Pixar, Pinterest, Marvel, Disney and Nike move consumers as few others can.

Many brands attempt to inspire their customers by their energy, their purpose or by creating a customer experience that is uplifting. Being inspired is one of the most admired and sought-after brand achievements. What brands have gotten there? And which have disappointed on this dimension? Let’s take a look:

The Most Inspiring Brands of 2018

The new 2018 Prophet Brand Relevance Index® (BRI), having the strength of 299 top brands from over 39 categories, was conducted by Prophet. Respondents, who were active in the category and familiar with the brand, provided some answers to key questions surrounding brand relevance. One of the 16 measures in the survey was “whether the brand inspired me”.  From here we looked at the “inspiring” brands from last year and decided to take another look using the 2018 BRI data.

“Being inspired is one of the most admired and sought-after brand achievements.”

Pinterest, again, was the most inspiring brand. They are on a mission to help people discover the things they love and inspire them to go do those things in their daily lives. It stretches boundaries by fostering a person’s creativity and desire to try something new with projects—an activity such as cooking for kids, decorating a room in your home, building something new, starting a craft, learning a new exercise, creating a social program, with the list going on and on. One is connected with ideas and people that are also interested in this challenge.

Many of the other inspiration-led brands also enable a person to do or learn something.  This includes Food Network (#2), Etsy (#3), Lego (#4), FitBit (#10), NPR (#11) and M.A.C. (#15).  The experience of these brands promises to deliver connection with others, discovering the new, and create a feeling of creative accomplishment or meaning.

3 Key Routes of Inspiring Brands

Three routes are suggested by the other top “inspiring” brands.

  1. Providing entertaining stories of role models, real or fictitious, that are inspiring. Pixar at #5, Disney at #6 and Marvel at #9, all provide characters and vicarious experiences that can inspire.
  2. Being inspired by the mood or feelings that are put in place. Spotify at #7 and Pandora at #16 create music experiences that can add inspiration to the enjoyment of the moment and even contribute a mindset that leads to excelling in other activities. It is noteworthy that Spotify and Pandora, like Pinterest, also personalize content.
  3. Earning status for being inspiring with products, personality, message, and expectations for customers, which is illustrated by #9 Apple and #12 Nike.

The Category Effect on Inspiring Brands

There is also a strong category effect. Some categories, such as apparel (Nike, Zara, Adidas and Victoria’s Secret), or electronics & gaming (Fitbit, Electronic Arts, PlayStation, Xbox, Bose), did well.  Brands in other categories such as insurance, finance, and telecommunication, do not seem to inspire.

Most categories contain differences in the ability of brands to be inspiring. Can you explain these differences?  Should the weaker brands attempt to close the gap?  If so, how should they go about it?

Here are a few interesting notes collected from the data:

  • Airlines: Southwest was in the top quarter, while American and United were in the bottom.
  • Toys: In general, the toy brands did well, although LEGO and Fisher-Price were decidedly above Hasbro and Mattel.
  • Consumer Products: M.A.C. and Dove were in the top quartile, while mature, functional brands like Tide, Crest, Old Spice (despite some creative positioning), Ziploc, Palmolive, Windex, and Kleenex, were in the bottom quartile. A sidenote—Method, Band-Aid, and Clorox, were high on purpose, a closely-related dimension.
  • Food: Hershey’s, Betty Crocker, and Ben & Jerry’s, were above or close to the top quartile, while Cheerios, Campbell Soup, Oreo, and Dannon, were found in the lowest quartile.
  • Hospitality: The Cosmopolitan of Las Vegas and Marriott were in the top quartile, while Carnival Cruise Line, Westin, and Harrah’s, were in the bottom half.
  • Drug and Grocery Stores: Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s were in the top quartile, while CVS, Walgreens, Safeway and 7-Eleven appeared in the lowest quartile.
  • Durables: KitchenAid was a top 20 brand, while Peloton and Keurig were close. Others like Frigidaire were in the bottom quartile, with Bosch, Haier, and Maytag coming in close.
  • Social Media and Internet Services: Although many of these brands have top inspirational scores; Skype, Twitter, Facebook and Yelp were in the bottom half; Yahoo! and Tinder were in the bottom quartile.
  • Beverages: Folgers was in the top quartile but Aquafina, Mountain Dew, Monster, Red Bull, Nissan, and Pepsi appeared in the lowest quartile.
  • Automobiles: Tesla, Toyota, Honda, and Ford were in the top quartile, but Volkswagen was in the bottom quartile with Mercedes close-by.
  • Computing and Software: Apple was a top 20 brand; Sony, Android and Samsung were comfortably in the top quartile. This being said, Huawei, Cortana, Bixby, and Siri were in the bottom quartile.

Reimagine
Brands

RELATED SERVICE

FINAL THOUGHTS

These data-driven observations should trigger some deep thought and analysis for how to drive inspiration throughout your organization.

Download the 2018 Prophet Brand Relevance Index for more insights regarding inspiring brands.

CONNECT WITH US

BLOG

Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index® – Who are the Innovative Brands in 2018?

Tech brands, led by Apple, Android, Google and Samsung, are perceived as the most modern and inventive.

In most categories, brands aspire to be perceived as innovative. Brands create new value propositions, new brand-driven promotions, and/or new programs to enhance the offering or support shared values. Brand innovation will lend credibility to brand promises and add brand energy, a key element in the quest to be relevant in a dynamic market.

What brands have done just that: created a perception of being innovative? Prophet’s Brand Relevance Index® (BRI) of 2018 provides some answers.

BRI 2018: How Did We Measure Brand Innovation?

In the U.S., the BRI measures the strength of 299 top brands from over 37 categories, among respondents that were active in the category and familiar with the brand.  One of the 16 measures in the survey was “always finding new ways to meet my needs” and provides a measure of perceived innovativeness.

“Brand innovation will lend credibility to brand promises and add brand energy, a key element in the quest to be relevant in a dynamic market.”

Of the top 20 “innovative” brands, 15 of them come from high-tech categories involving computing, software, social media, Internet services, electronics, or gaming.  These brands include, in order, Apple, Android, Pinterest, Google, Samsung, PlayStation, Xbox, Spotify, YouTube, Electronic Arts, Sony, Intel, and Bose.  It is a remarkable testament to how the high-tech world has set a standard for innovation with new features, new offerings, and even new subcategories all happening at a breathtaking speed.

The other five brands, Amazon, Netflix, Nike, Lego, and Fisher-Price, were exceptional for their category on innovation.  Their success reflects how hard it is to be recognized as innovative.

What Makes an Innovative Brand in Key Categories?

The value of this Index and others like it is to make successful role models visible and also provide examples of brands that have struggled.  Learnings can come from each.  Looking at specific categories and comparing winners and losers is instructive.  Consider the following questions and in doing so, keep in mind that the respondents are familiar with the brand and many will be brand users:

  • Automobiles: Why are Mercedes, Nissan and Volkswagen in the lowest quartile for innovation while Toyota, Honda and Chevrolet are in the highest?
  • Restaurants: Why is Chick-fil-A in the top quartile and KFC in the bottom?  And why are In-N-Out Burger and Shake Shack in the bottom quartile?
  • Media: Why are they all in the bottom quartile and, within that group, why are CNN, Huffington Post and USA Today significantly below the others?
  • Retail Banking and Investments: Brands in this group emphasize innovation but have only two brands that are even in the top half on “innovativeness”: Capital One and Fidelity, and five brands that are in the bottom 10%, Schwab, TD Ameritrade, U.S. Bank, Lending Tree, HSBC. Why are these brands unable to communicate their innovations?
  • Clothing: Why are Zara and The North Face in the top quartile while H&M and Patagonia in the bottom quartile?
  • Appliances: Why is KitchenAid a top ten innovation brand?  Why are most of the rest in the bottom half of the innovativeness ratings?
  • Personal Assistant: Why is Alexa well above Siri on innovativeness while Cortana and Bixby are significantly lower ranked?
  • Hotels: Why are Marriott and Hilton high on innovativeness and substantially above Holiday Inn, Hyatt, and Westin?
  • Technology: Why are some technology brands like Twitter, LinkedIn and IBM Watson relatively low on innovativeness?

What emerges from such an exercise are some aha insights and some mysteries that can end up being the most instructive of all.

Reimagine
Brands

RELATED SERVICE

FINAL THOUGHTS

The goal of the BRI is not only to identify which brands are most relevant but why. Brand innovation is just one of the contributors to relevance that we concluded from the 2018 BRI; the four characteristics that make up relentlessly relevant brands are customer-obsessed, ruthlessly pragmatic, distinctively inspired, and pervasively innovative. For each, we dug into why one brand is relevant to consumers and another not. The result is actionable strategies businesses can implement and use to grow and gain relevance in the future.

Learn more insights regarding brand innovation and relevance in the 2018 Prophet Brand Relevance Index®.

CONNECT WITH US

Your network connection is offline.

caret-downcloseexternal-iconfacebook-logohamburgerinstagramlinkedinpauseplaythreads-icontwitterwechat-qrcodesina-weibowechatxing