Which brands do we admire?
Marketers are all trying to build great brands that are truly admired above all others in their competitive spaces. While some brands resonate, many others fail to be noticed, fail to be remembered, and therefore fail to leave a lasting positive emotional impression with consumers.
Although several brand equity valuations are regularly published, these primarily value brands in terms of accounting measures. Financial size, rather than consumer connection, becomes the underlying issue on which great brands are defined. Brands with the highest profits come out near the top.
These approaches don’t reveal which brands perform best at connecting at a consumer level. Although useful for financial analysts, existing brand equity valuations do not give marketers much guidance as to why some brands are admired by consumers and why many others are not.
I set to out establish two things: first, the brands that Australians most admire; and second, what drives brand admiration.
The approach used spontaneous questioning of a large group of Australians. Spontaneous questioning meant that there was no prompting with a list or industry category; it was left to the consumers to evoke their most admired brands. Consumers could mention any brand and as many brands as wanted.
Using spontaneous questioning also meant that the drivers of admiration were not based on consumers responding to a predefined and therefore prompted code frame. Consumers were free to respond with any particular reason or attribute that they felt created their admiration for a particular brand.
Using this methodology, for a brand to be admired it had to have been noticed, remembered, and have left a lasting positive emotional impression.
And the results? Cadbury is the brand that is most admired, with more than 10% of Australians spontaneously mentioning it. Dick Smith and Sony are equal second, at almost 8%. The next most admired brands are Nestle (yes, Australians love chocolate), Coles, Virgin, Woolworths, Microsoft, and Coca-Cola, with Arnott’s and Kellogg’s tied in 10th place.
The top 30 most admired brands in Australia
Brand
Admiration
Rank |
Brand |
Main industry |
1 |
Cadbury |
Food |
2 |
Dick Smith |
Various |
3 |
Sony |
Electronics |
4 |
Nestle |
Food |
5 |
Coles |
Retail |
6 |
Virgin |
Various |
7 |
Woolworths |
Retail |
8 |
Microsoft |
IT |
9 |
Coca-Cola |
Beverage |
10 |
Arnott's |
Food |
11 |
Kellogg's |
Food |
12 |
Toyota |
Automotive |
13 |
Sanitarium |
Food |
14 |
Holden |
Automotive |
15 |
LG |
Electronics |
16 |
BHP |
Industrial |
17 |
Nike |
Clothing and footwear |
18 |
Heinz |
Food |
19 |
Apple |
IT |
20 |
Myer |
Retail |
21 |
Qantas |
Airline |
22 |
Target |
Retail |
23 |
Dairy Farmers |
Food |
24 |
Golden Circle |
Food |
25 |
McDonald's |
Quick service restaurant |
26 |
Johnson & Johnson |
Consumer products |
27 |
Nokia |
Telecommunications |
28 |
Ford |
Automotive |
29 |
Panasonic |
Electronics |
30 |
Big W |
Retail |
Other notable results
Australia’s most admired brand of car? Holden? Ford? No, it is Toyota at 12th place overall. Holden is 14th and Ford is 28th. Other car brands placed well back in the field are Honda at 43, BMW at 55, Mazda at 70 and Mitsubishi at 71. Mercedes Benz, which often features highly on financial brand equity valuations, did not rank in the top 100.
In the cola wars, Australians have a clearly most admired brand. Coca-Cola is in the top 10, while both Schweppes and Pepsi are outside the top 100!
The quick service restaurant brand we most admire is McDonald’s, which is ranked inside the top 30. Eat its burgers or not, McDonald’s is a great example of global and Australian brand marketing success. Despite its critics, who over the years have sought to establish causality between the brand and a host of world problems (obesity, deforestation, animal cruelty, waste production, poor staff working conditions and even Third World poverty), the McDonald’s brand marketers have done very well to make it so admired by Australians.
What of KFC, Subway, Hungry Jack’s, Pizza Hut, Red Rooster, Dominos, and others? Although some have more stores nationally and others have been established longer, McDonald’s is streets ahead on the brand admiration score. McDonald’s is ranked 25th overall, and no other quick service restaurant brand features in the top 150 most admired Australian brands.
None of the big telecommunications companies feature in Australia’s top 30 most admired brands. The most admired in the telecommunications category is in fact Nokia, which as a telecommunications handset brand came in 27th. In terms of the service providers, Telstra placed 32nd, Optus 39th and AAPT 87th.
Australia’s most admired bank? Perhaps not surprisingly in an era of interest rate pressures none featured in the top 30, although Westpac is the most admired bank at 40. The rest are further back, with one of the ‘Big 4’ ranking behind eight other financial institutions and not making it into the top 100!
When it comes to clothing and footwear, Australians (still) admire Nike the most (ranked 17th), followed by Bonds (just outside the top 30), and then Adidas, Billabong and Colorado (all outside the top 60). Most interesting are both the absence of many other global fashion and sporting clothing brands and the ability of Nike to be so strongly admired. In an age when brand marketers focus much effort on being seen as socially responsible, Nike’s overwhelming positive resonance, despite the sweatshop scandals that have featured in the media since the mid 1990s, reflects (like McDonald’s) a remarkable marketing and public relations performance.
Another feature of the list is that the brands with the most iconic and emotive advertising did not necessarily do that well. Qantas comes in at number 20, whereas BHP, which has little emotive consumer brand advertising, comes in at 16.
What drives admiration? I will cover this in more detail in an article in next month’s Marketing Update. However, it is clear from the results that there is no one factor. Great brands are admired for a variety of reasons. Certainly being perceived to have quality products, great service and fair and reasonable prices are very common traits of admired brands. The top 10 brands generally score well here, particularly Cadbury, Sony, Nestle, Coca-Cola, Arnott’s and Kellogg’s on quality products; Virgin on service; and Woolworths and Coles on value for money.
Being Australian also helps seven of the top 30 brands be admired (Dick Smith, Arnott’s, Holden, BHP, Qantas, Dairy Farmers and Golden Circle). Only four of these (Dick Smith, Qantas, Dairy Farmers and Golden Circle) are considered by consumers to be iconic Australian brands.
Being socially responsible is also an important driver. Although most top 30 brands score some votes here McDonald’s, above all other leading brands, has its brand admiration particularly strongly driven by perceptions of social responsibility.
Additional brand admiration drivers, which gave an edge to specific brands in the top 30, are: innovativeness (to Virgin, Microsoft, and particularly Apple) and admired leadership (to Dick Smith, Virgin and Microsoft).
Finally, what of the power of corporate environmental responsibility? Although several leading brands are starting to offer options that enable their customers to reduce their carbon footprint when consuming their product or service, no brand is particularly admired here — yet. None of the top 30 brands have admiration driven by their environmental efforts. It therefore seems that there is a potential upside in terms of consumer admiration for genuine environmental performance.
Next issue I will expand further on the question of what drives brand admiration.
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