On Surveys: Most Respected Brands

Earlier this week the branding consulting firm CoreBrand released “Brand Respect,” a report that identifies and ranks the (world’s?) most and least respected corporate brands based on proprietary data the company collects. The news is that Delta ranked last, and Pepsi and Coca-Cola tied for first.  You can study the methodology here, in CoreBrand’s press release.

There is a lot to say about this report, which does its ranking based on “familiarity” and “favorability” rankings. The companies with the highest scores in each are ranked highest; the companies with high rankings for familiarity and low rankings for favorability are ranked lowest. 

It’s important to understand that every ranking system has its pluses and minuses. They are what they are; you can like the design, or not. For my part, the rankings got me thinking about “respect,” and how this value can be applied to marketing and business strategy.

CoreBrand went out of its way to talk about the “opportunity” for companies with lower rankings, especially for those already making “branding investments,” which are apparently “starting to deliver a return on investment.” This I view with some cynicism, given the source. But equally interesting, the study suggests that many or most brands are on the decline respect-wise, and that this reflects both the economy and consumer sentiment about brands in general.

In the report, there is some discussion of the branding investments, which mainly have to do with advertising (and a few to do with the actual brand experience; for example, restaurant redesign). What is noticeably absent is any correlation between social media activity and brand familiarity and/or favorability—the brand experience investment that absolutely everyone is making, for better or worse. It’s hard to know what to make of this.

There is also exactly one financial services company on the list of 20 (Top 10, Bottom 10). This is very surprising, given the economy and the disastrous bailouts over the past few years.

For my part, there are plenty of companies with which I am familiar and which I respect—but don’t necessarily like. So if I ran one of the companies measured in this survey, I would have to think hard about how much the results matter. 

The bottom line: for the companies that were surveyed, this report is only marginally useful. Its primary benefit, from what I can tell, is to provide fodder for investing in brand experiences. On the other hand, the survey is very important for CoreBrand. Here they have successfully employed a tool to demonstrate how they think about branding. They have provided “news” for the public’s consideration. And, they may have prompted a company or two to think about the strength of their brand, and whether a consulting firm like CoreBrand could help them.

Thus, a marketing tip. SURVEYS WORK. They are a form of intellectual capital, about which I have written often because I believe it is the single most effective marketing tool services companies have available to them. Surveys get attention. The media loves them because they are easy to report on; the public loves them because they tend to be intellectually accessible. Designing surveys with integrity, and reporting the results with integrity, is not as easy as it may seem. But when you have something compelling to offer, and there is a reason for the consumer to take action as a result, surveys are a potential goldmine.

Camp Gyno

Advertising again. 

This week a new spot went viral among women and girls; as of this writing the YouTube version has had more than five million views, suggesting that we are on to something important. 

The ad is called “Camp Gyno,” and it is from a new company called Helloflo (www.helloflo.com). This is a company apparently aspiring to create a new category: menstruation management. A subscription is purchased; Helloflo sends what we used to call “sanitary products,” plus candy, on a schedule specified by the user.

I have no opinion about the value proposition of the product, or even the concept of the company. I assume that they did some research and discovered a niche of women who manage this fairly predictable human function week by week, and I admire the entrepreneurial spirit.

But the ad itself caught me off guard, prompting me to wonder if I have completely lost touch. It features a lonely young girl who gets her first period at camp, and somehow leverages this occasion into a position of power over her “fellow” campers. She dispenses tampons and lectures. Frankly, she doesn’t seem to be very nice in the process.

Then, suddenly, her power is dissipated … by Helloflo. The other girls start receiving packages of product in the mail, and the princess of gyno is reduced once more to a mere mortal. 

I understand that on some level this is funny, or at least entertaining. Again, I assume that it was tested with the target audience (adolescent girls) and that it tested well. 

As someone a bit beyond her adolescent years, I am interested in how the ad productizes a human function—commercializes it. This is of course no more or less a problem than the commercialization of erectile dysfunction … and there’s no question that using the media to increase awareness of this condition and a potential solution to it has changed some people’s lives.

But about this topic, presented in this ad, I have questions.

A product is supposed to provide a benefit, and the marketing of it is supposed to showcase the benefit. For me, the idea that the onset of menses somehow confers control over others feels somewhat strange. Status? No question. But power? 

More to the point, the ad doesn’t exactly position the benefits of Helloflo services—like convenience, privacy and personalization; i.e., (per their website) care and appreciation for the sensitivity of the purchase. Instead, the ad makes a strange control freak of a girl the problem we’re solving. Boxes of products mailed, with candy, on a schedule, neutralize her power; she pouts and everyone else lives happily ever after.

If you search for more information about this ad you will see that it has audaciously used language as yet unheard of in its domain. For better or worse, the ad speaks to girls in their language. I suggest better.

But aside from its entertainment value, is "Camp Gyno" sending the message we want our girls to hear?