Key points
Interbrand Best Global Brands 2024 is out. This year’s edition marks 25 years since they started in 2000. What can we learn from them to propel our brands and therefore our businesses forward in 2025? We read and summarised the findings so you don’t have to!
Competing on product and price alone is so last century.
To set the scene, in the year 2000 when Interbrand started, the best-selling brand of phone was the Nokia 3310, Netflix have just started sending DVDs in the mail, Yahoo! dominated search, Kodak was the top camera brand, and Facebook, YouTube and Instagram did not exist.
Fast forward 25 years, people are more informed, more demanding, and more fragmented than before. It’s a totally new game; there is abundance of choice, the speed of innovation and adoption is relentless, and competitive advantage is a constant flux. The threshold of what’s good enough continues to rise.
Remember Big Data? The spread of the internet and real-time data has seen a shift in boardroom focus to operational efficiency and short-term returns on investment. This has led to optimisation, activation and streamlining being the dominant marketing activities. However, the assumption was that the brand can continue to stay relevant and attract demand in the absence of investment, when the opposite is true.
Some brands, people just buy. Others, people desire.
Research shows that many brands exist at the periphery of our lives. We buy things out of habit or need, but no one buys a Ferrari or Birkin handbag because they need one. These decisions takes days and emotional investment. And the reason why luxury brands tend to outperform others in ranking. This rule has been applied to the most mundane of categories including… toilet paper, aka Who Gives a Crap. In creating a connection with the brand, it created a level of desire in a loo roll!
The digital revolution, including the launch of the smartphone, brought about seamless online and offline experiences. With the declining trust in traditional sources of authority, brands are expected to show leadership and integrity.
“As a result, the world’s brands have become complex meaning systems with which we have a sensorial, functional, emotional, personal and even moral relationship.”
Brands that build relationships across these dimension become iconic. We recognise them, enjoy them, depend on them. And will follow them into new spaces. Think about how Apple (#1) went from Macbook computers to iPod, iTunes, iPhones, Apple Watch and Apple Pay. They have transcended categories at a global scale because they have built personal relationships with people. And they are not the only one, many in the top 25 have also unlocked exponential pathways to growth, including Amazon (#3 – the largest bookstore/everything store, entertainment and web business) and Disney (#16 – animated content, film, theme parks and real estate). Instead of finding customers based on their competencies, they built competencies around the customers’ changing needs. They are able to do that by understanding their customers exceptionally well.
An Arena strategy
Brands that operate across categories into arenas are at the heart of the new paradigm. (Arenas have been defined as competitive spaces where different players address the same need, whether to connect, play, move or thrive. To learn more about arenas, read our blog on Interbrand 2023 here). Interbrand argues that every brand should have an arena strategy, not merely to be defensive and spot competitive threats from unlikely corners (think about Kodak’s disappearance) but also to be on the offensive and proactive (remember when Netflix said they compete against sleep?). The way it works is to address the same need in different ways. Disney hasn’t strayed too far from play, though offering up more than cartoons these days.
Creating desire and emotional connection is the key to creating demand, and the role of brand has expanded over time. With the decline in trust in traditional sources of authority, brands are expected to take leadership and therefore develop complex meaning systems for consumers. Brands that succeed understand their consumer at a deeper level, enabling them to offer solutions to their needs across categories and evolve with changing need.
“The fastest-growing companies are not branding their businesses—they’re businessing their brand.”
Blog sources:
https://interbrand.com/best-global-brands/
