Marketing Week’s ‘Top 50 British Brands’ made interesting and confusing reading to me over the weekend, not least because it was almost entirely dominated by consumer focused brands.
Drawing on the findings from the Brand Finance valuation survey, the list features the 50 ‘most valuable brands of British origin’ and suggests that British business is on the up as these companies have increased their combined brand value from £166bn in 2009 to £199bn in 2010.
The top five are Vodafone, HSBC, Tesco, Orange and Shell. Clearly the survey’s findings were developed before the Gulf of Mexico oil spill as BP sit at 7th.
Call me a skeptic but don’t most UK marketers work in a business selling things to other businesses? Digging deeper, there are a handful of overtly B2B companies such as professional services firms PWC (8), KPMG (11), Deloitte (12), Ernst & Young (14), the mining group RioTinto (29), information and education provider Pearson (34) and security firm G4S (38), But I find the list and how it was created somehow disappointing from a B2B marketing perspective.
Why? Most of the remaining companies on the list operate in consumer and business markets, and muddy the waters with their marketing by trying to apply a common approach. Also, emotional scoring plays a big part in brand value metrics, and this is significantly more important in a consumer brand evaluation as opposed to the complex, multi tier, multi contact influencer approach required in business marketing. B2C and B2B brands should be treated separately.
When they’re not, we end up with a table that gives Vodafone and Tesco a much higher rating than Rio Tinto or G4S. But is this right or fair? Can we truly compare a business like Rio Tinto on similar metrics to a company like Vodafone and then rank them? Personally, I don’t think we can because they operate in different ways, delivering different needs to very different customers.
Expanding the argument further, here is the 2010 list of 500 ‘business superbrands’. How many are actually business superbrands, as opposed to ‘consumer with a business division’ to ‘true consumer/business hybrid?’ Again, I’m not convinced
Marmite sandwich box image courtesy of KitchenCritic
