BrandZ Top 100: Commentary

Millward Brown Optimor released the 2009 BrandZ Top 100 and Brand Curve recently posted the highlights from the findings.

Jeremy Bullmore, author of Behind the Scenes in Advertising, columnist of ‘Dear Jeremy’, chairman of J. Walter Thompson Co. and subsequently of WPP Group, and Director of the Guardian, provided an introductory commentary for the BrandZ 2009 report. 

Bullmore argues against the notion that brands were invented by manipulative marketeers to pursuade consumers into purchasing high-priced but otherwise “unremarkable” commidities.

He claims that we’ve been building brands since 1955 when Sidney Levy and Burleigh Gardner’s The Product and the Brand was published by the Harvard Business Review. But that “brands had been around for a very long time before the Harvard Business Review brought them to our attention.”

He asks us to think back to our school days to understand the relationship between brands and individual perception of those brands:

“When you first started thinking of that school down the road from your own – the one that always beat you at games – you invented your first brand. It had a name – and it had a very clear personality. You couldn’t say exactly why you hated it – but you did. And what’s more, so did your friends. But if you’d asked the boys and girls from the school down the road what they thought of their school, you’d have got a very different answer. How puzzling. Exactly the same school, yet two totally different reputations.”

He explains that the observer creates the reputation of the brand – it can only exist in their minds and as each observer is different, so too are the reputations. And so, there would be a million slightly different versions of a brand’s reputation. He writes that, “Gardner and Levy drew our attention to the fact that the personality of a product, as created in the head of each observer, could be as important to its users as its function.” And so, the marketers must create and supply what Bullmore calls the raw material that real people can take to subjectively compose the brand image.

This is exactly what the Millward Brown researcher take into consideration. Strong brands enjoy what they call a favourable consensus of subjectivity. He concludes that the brand managers, “didn’t build those brands themselves; but they fed such enticing titbits to their audience that their audience gratefully did the rest.”

Time to feed the masses what they’re craving!