The keys to brand success

Today, brands are no longer in control, people are.  Even top corporate leaders will confess their greatest fear is one of irrelevance as they attempt to manage their brands amidst perpetual contextual turbulence.

We’ve identified three keys to unlock brand success in the 2020s: Expectations, Context, Empathy. We often simply over-estimate how important individual brands are for consumers, but after several months of work and living through the pandemic, Ipsos has completed an analysis across thousands of brands and ad studies across multiple geographies, and we’ve identified a framework of these three key factors for brand success.

The first is EXPECTATIONS. How brands frame themselves and shape expectations has a huge impact on how people receive and respond to them. One can see purchase intent double simply by telling someone something is super-premium. Ryanair succeeds in setting expectations of its services so low – by its Chief Executive telling the media he plans to remove seats and replace them with bicycle seats or put a coin-operated lock on the toilet – that people are delighted to find a normal seat and a free toilet on the plane. Another great example is Budweiser positioning the brand outside US as premium, using Lionel Messi to create a huge buzz via social media for his record of scoring goals and creating a special edition bottle that is sent to the goalkeepers of the opposing teams…

Understanding expectations really matters, shaping them is even more important.

The second is CONTEXT. People aren’t robots making carefully balanced decisions on the relative price and utility of different purchases.  Context matters – we see massive shifts in selection criteria during and after the pandemic across a range of categories of products and services.  Overall, up to 50% of brand choice can be driven by societal or behavioural factors – alongside the other 50% being driven by the traditional functional and emotional benefits.  Our Ipsos Global Trends survey shows rising proportions saying they want to buy brands which share their values, and although there is always a “say-do gap” between what people say is important versus what is actually correlated with real behaviour, we can see this overall context for consumers growing in salience, as they feel under pressure from global uncertainty.

we can see this overall context for consumers growing in salience

Finally, there is EMPATHY – the most successful brands demonstrate they are on your side: analysis of 6,500 ads shows those which understand people fully, act to help them and reflect what they value, are those that outperform. And analysis of all these ads demonstrates that, while generating unique, original and entertaining advertising is a price-of-entry, it is empathy that puts the “extra” into "ordinary". In fact, those ads that are both creative and show empathy have a much higher impact in-market, be it sales lift, building equity or market share gain. In parallel, our brand equity database demonstrates the growing importance of empathy for the choice of the brands.

It is empathy that puts the “extra” into "ordinary"

EXPECTATIONS / CONTEXT / EMPATHY – the three key factors that matter for successful brands – we look forward to discussing them with you in 2023.