Lucian Camp is a financial services brand consultant, copywriter, author and blogger. He co-presents the On The Other Hand podcast.
Those of us (including, obviously, me) who believe in the power and value of brands have been searching for our own equivalent of the Holy Grail for as long as I can remember.
That equivalent is, of course, a reliable and robust methodology for measuring the value of brands – and within that, for measuring the positively ginormous amount of value that we firmly believe our marketing and communications activities are adding to them.
Imagine how the world would change if such a methodology existed. What a difference it would make to the kind of negotiations we’d have with our finance directors. “With last year’s budget we added £75 million to the value of the brand, so can we go for the same again this year?” we’d ask. “No no, dear boy, I insist, have twice as much – let’s go for £150 million this time!”, the CFO would reply.
These days there are a fair few brand valuation consultancies regularly producing tables and rankings of brands by value, so you might think that happy scenes like this aren’t too far away.
However, sadly, you’d be wrong. I can’t believe there’s any bogus science anywhere on the planet that comes up with more obviously and comically ludicrous propositions, not even homeopathy. No-one in their right mind would think they’re worth sharing with any finance directors. You’d simply be confirming their view that you’re an idiot.
As it happens, the latest iterations of two of the regularly-published UK brand valuation league tables have come into my hands in the last few days. Let me share some key points with you.
Before I do, I should note in a rather half-hearted attempt at fairness that there are important differences between them. One seeks to rank brands by their cash value, the other by the extent to which they’re “loved” by consumers. One focuses mainly (but not entirely) on corporate brands, the other mainly (but not entirely) on product brands. And one concentrates mainly on UK-based companies, the other mainly on brands that are available in the UK wherever the company is based. But none of this really matters, because they’re both ridiculous.
On to my first question: how many brands appear in the top ten in both studies? All of them? Most? Several? The answer, of course, is none. Only one – Tesco – appears in both top twenties. Not a good start.
Next question: in what I will call Table A, what business areas are the top three brands in? Consumer goods? Booze? Tech? Fashion? Media? Well, no. Number one is an oil company (Shell), and astoundingly numbers two and three are accounting firms (EY and PWC). Really? (By the way, number five is also an oil company, BP, and number seven is also an accounting firm, KPMG.) Shell is listed as the most valuable brand by miles, being over twice as valuable as any other except EY.
In Table B, the top names are certainly big consumer brands – Amazon, Cadbury, Coca-Cola and Apple occupy the first four places, with no sign of any accounting firms – but even so we don’t have to scroll down very far before things start getting a little strange. Do I really believe, for example, that PayPal earns its place in the top twenty, well ahead of Nike, Disney, Mercedes-Benz and Sainsbury’s? And what is it about this table and champagne brands? The top 100 doesn’t include a single beer, but it does include Moet & Chandon (as high as number 23), Laurent-Perrier, Veuve Clicquot, Taittinger and Lanson.
That said, this table is actually dominated by soft drinks, which account for just over a quarter – 26 – of the top 100. No tea or coffee brands, no dairy products, only four confectionery brands, but 26 soft drinks including giants such as Volvic, Buxton and Rubicon.
Both top 100 tables include quite a number of brands that I haven’t heard of. The most highly-ranked of these, LSEG, comes in at number 13 in Table A (actually, Google tells me that this is the preferred name for what used to be London Stock Exchange Group, which I have heard of, but still). Then there are WTW, DS Smith, Intertek and Whitley Neill – maybe I’m just revealing my own ignorance, but I doubt it.
I could go on at much greater length about the relative eccentricities within both tables – is Table B right to say the Rolls-Royce brand is really less “loved” than Whitley Neill, and Table A to say it’s less valuable than the widely-hated Openreach or fag=floggers Rothmans? And how about Table A placing John Lewis some ten places behind LexisNexis?
But I think I’ve made my point. These supposedly robust brand strength rankings really aren’t worth the paper they’re written on, which is annoying because I wasted fourteen sheets of quite good-quality paper printing the two top 100s to make them easier to scrutinise..
Oh well. The effort hasn’t been completely wasted. I only printed one side, so at least I have fourteen sheets of useful scrap.
