Havas Media study determines world's most meaningful brands

If 77% of all brands disappeared tomorrow, people would be indifferent. However, 76% of people believe brands to be essential to their livelihoods, at least in some capacity.

Havas Media, a division of the global marketing and communications group Havas, has recently completed the first phase of their ongoing study entitled ‘Meaningful Brands’ with the goal of determining how brands tangibly improve people’s lives and the role brands play in society. Havas Media defines a meaningful brand as one which has an impact on both our personal and collective well beings, in addition to offering functional benefits.

What Havas Media ascertained from this contradiction is the brands that people deem ancillary to their lives are those that produce high quality content, which accounts for only 55% of all content. Havas Media says great content ought to inspire, entertain, educate, inform, help and reward the consumer, otherwise the brand cannot make a strong connection with its audience.

To gather the most helpful data pertaining to content effectiveness, Havas Media incorporated brands from 22 industries to analyse any quality consistencies within a subset of branding. The automotive, electronics and travel industries are the ones with the highest amount of excellent content, while the energy, restaurant and insurance agencies struggle the most with developing outstanding content.

Havas Media underscores the importance of a brand making a connection with their consumers, as it is in the brand’s best interest to do so. Havas does this most strikingly by showcasing the fact of meaningful brands boasting more than double the percentage of repurchase intent among clients than brands that aren’t meaningful. This is great news for companies such as Mercedes-Benz and BMW, both of which are among the top ten most meaningful brands, as the companies can expect consumers to remain loyal to their products. The equivalent metric for free brands would be revisit intent, and it comes as no surprise that Google, the most meaningful brand in the world according to the report, would have such a high revisit rate.

The study commenced in 2008, and featured research involving more than 350,000 citizens across 31 markets.