How Deep Is Your Love?

Thoughts on BC’s Most Loved Brands

The other week, a few colleagues and I attended the annual BC’s Most Loved Brands event hosted by Ipsos Canada.

I am always interested in learning about successful brands and how they’ve built a loyal following. And I was looking forward to picking some insights that might inspire our thinking.

The ranking is based on a survey that Ipsos runs annually in a number of provinces and states. In this case, they surveyed 1349 citizens on 65 “BC brands” — defined as brands from organizations headquartered in British Columbia.

The formula for Brand love, or “Effective Equity” used in the study was:

Attitudinal Equity

(The ability to create strong brand resonance with the target audience.)

±

Market Effects

(Factors impacting which brands we wind up buying.)

According to Ipsos, if you move your equity up a little bit your market share will follow because consumers resonate with brands that meet personal and emotional needs.

Common sense, right? So far so good.

Drumroll please

Next, after laying out the formula, they counted down each of brands in the Top 20 love list:

My initial reaction was that there weren’t a lot of surprises. Many of these companies have a storied longevity in BC.

But, thinking about my own life as a customer and British Columbian — and my working life as a consultant helping brands cope with change in the digital age—the list in its entirety just didn’t ring true for me.

Are these really our “MOST LOVED” brands?

Don’t get me wrong. Like all Canadians, I love a homegrown product and take great pride in seeing homegrown brands be recognized.

I enjoy claiming BC-born celebrities as our own, and the same goes for brands.

I was born in BC, and over the years I have been a consumer of every single one of these brands except for one (Pacific Blue Cross). And I certainly agree that some are without peer and without substitute.

For instance, I distinctly remember my first White Spot Pirate Pak, and proudly pass that ritual onto my kids today (full transparency: White Spot is a client).

My kid with her Pirate Pal.

I also swear by the Purdy’s peanut butter bar and have often wondered out loud why they don’t just expand into CPG and give the Kraft bears a run for their peanut butter money.

And I’m a little biased, but I think our airport is an impressive gateway to our world-class city. I also love that they have a sense of humour.

But as patriotic as I am, if a number of the brands on this list disappeared tomorrow, it would honestly cause me very little stress to switch.

And that just doesn’t jibe with “most loved”.

And what about the brands that didn’t make the list at all?

When I think about which local brands are thriving in today’s climate of digital change and disruption — really pushing the boundaries of their category and earning a ton of love in the process — I think about brands like:

Herschel Supply
Recently named to Fast Company’s top 10 most innovate companies.

Mountain Equipment Co-op
850k members in BC alone. That’s some love right there.

lululemon
Despite some bad publicity recently, they are one of Canada’s most valuable brands and, if you walk down any street in Vancouver and look at what people are wearing, it’s clear that they have a pretty loyal following.

And those are just a few of the big ones.

Lush Cosmetics North America, Native Shoes, Arc’teryx, John Fluevog and HSBC Canada also come to mind.

And what about B2B brands? Ask any user of Hootsuite (10M users) and Slack (500k users in a year and growing quickly) how valuable those products are in their lives and I’m sure they would trump many others.

But that’s just me.

And, really, my questions are less about who’s on the list than what the list can really teach us.

Forget the list, what are the lessons?

I think the challenge I have with this survey is with the way brand love has been defined.

And, more to the point, what this definition implies for folks like me. And for other marketers who are trying to extract lessons that can be more widely applied.

For this year’s survey, Ipsos utilized a number of factors to get respondents to rate their attitudes towards brands. This included attributes such as likelihood of future interactions, positive buzz, and visibility.

The top 6 drivers that impact brand equity are highlighted.

Images are from the Ipsos BC’s Most Loved Brands 2015 Video.

Visibility/Familiarity, in particular was highly skewed on physical exposure and exposure to mass media.

I wonder how many of the top 20 brands still rank despite not leveraging TV in their media mix?

It seems to me that this approach favours a specific kind of marketer: large scale consumer brands focused on a wide audience, and who are able to apply a higher media spend.

As a result, the list ends up focusing on brands that are loved widely, more than brands that are loved deeply.

It is an important distinction.

To me, the second category (loved deeply) is much more interesting than the first (loved widely). And, crucially, an examination of that deep variety of love is much more likely to lead to some useful insights other marketers can learn from.

Of course, there are overlaps between the two groups. Some brands would rank just as high in both categories. But to me the deep, abiding variety of love — the kind that drives true loyalty and creates widespread positive word of mouth — is infinitely more interesting. It’s more powerful, more valuable, and more important for modern marketers to understand.

How deep is the love?

So how could you measure how deep the love is for a brand? I’m no research expert, but what about asking:

• If the brand disappeared tomorrow, how painful would it be to switch to another brand?
• If the price of their goods went up 10%, would you still buy from that brand (e.g. Starbucks’ growth despite the rising price of coffee last year)?
• Over and above what the brand sells, does the brand create real meangingful value for you as a consumer (e.g. Nike and in particular Nike+)?
• Would you go out of your way to seek the brand, even if it was not easily accessible (e.g. Pirate Joes, the fan-powered version of Trader Joes)?
• Would you buy products and services from this brand outside of the typical category it trades in (e.g. Virgin)?
• If the brand did little or no marketing, would you still seek them out because you share the same beliefs (e.g. Method soaps)?
• Do you hear more about the brand through positive word-of-mouth than paid marketing (e.g. In-N-Out)?
• Great brands are cultivated from the inside. If you were to randomly poll an employee at one of these companies, would they be happy, proud, and an ambassador for the brand (e.g. Zappos)?

Do these questions make you reconsider, how deep is your love?

So much hair, so much soft light, so much love.

Truly, madly, deeply

I’m not discrediting the Ipsos study. I think there is merit in surveying people about the most important brands in the places where they live.

But I think Ipsos is missing an opportunity to explore the subject further, with more emphasis on the depth of love these brands create, and less on the breadth of their appeal.

Next time around, what about diving a little deeper into the results and providing some more insights on:

• Which brands score best at particular questions, especially when compared to other direct competitors?
• How these BC-based brands compare with others (in the eyes of BC citizens) to other brands (US and non-BC born) within their category?
• If you remove the variables that lead to brands being widely present (i.e. location, media), which brands resonate the most?
• Which brands score best with particular demographics?

I would find answers to these questions a lot more useful than just a top 20 list.

Wouldn’t you?