Brands and Superbrands – why your brand matters

16th
MAR

Brands and Superbrands – why your brand matters

Posted by Michael under Business Growth, Leadership

It’s been major business news that Microsoft has knocked Google off the top spot in the Business Superbrands poll – after two years, Google has ceded the #1 position and dropped to fifth. In the technology and new media worlds, this has been headline material, but the so-called Superbrands are rarely out of the news anyway: they’re household names and their activities affect all our lives, so what makes a brand into a superbrand and why does it matter?

Superbrands make more profit

At present it matters because the superbrands are being rewarded for their status – in what economists have dubbed a ‘flight to quality’, the tough new conditions for business have led to increased profitability for the superbrands, at the expense of their competitors.

Brand loyalty – the often emotional relationship that people have with a brand, has helped the superbrands to improve their positions to the detriment of their rivals, and America’s Greatest Brands calls this the Rule of Six:

Consumers who are loyal to a brand are six times more likely to

• Buy its products.
• Buy more of its products, buy more of its products more often, and/or trade up when buying (more of) its products.
• Recommend its products to friends, family, and colleagues.
• Invest in publicly traded companies.
• Rebuff competitive offers, especially those that are price-based.
• Give their preferred brand the benefit of the doubt in difficult circumstances or questionable situations.

Superbrands outstrip competition

In every case, a market leader, such as GlaxoSmithKline or Eddie Stobart, has managed to benefit from the economic downturn by improving its position over its rivals, as the rule of six has generated more sales, more upsales, more recommendations to purchase and more rejections of opposition offers.

Superbrands, therefore, engage with their loyal customer base in very specific ways, starting with a clear understanding of what place the brand occupies in the customer’s mind and where the place might be expanded or developed. In addition, superbrands keep engagement with the consumer at the centre of what they do – they don’t relax their focus on communication with their customer base. Finally, superbrands transmit their own values easily to their customers and build a shared base of values that deepens the emotional relationship between the brand and the individual buyer.

So who are the current superbrands? Full information can be found here, but brief highlights are that British Airways has made it back into the top ten after a year out of the coveted top spots, although BA’s pleasure may be limited by seeing Virgin a full four places ahead. British banks, unsurprisingly, have plummeted down the list, and RBS has actually fallen out of the top 500 for the first time but HSBC and Barclays have both improved their positions in the 500, perhaps because of consumer confidence in them because they didn’t need direct financial support from the government.

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