Mean about meaningfulness; and jobs for civil servants
Havas’ preposterous ‘meaningful brands’ report has no real world meaning, writes Dominic Mills. Plus: an alternative view on why the competition regulator is investigating Global’s Exterion deal
Perhaps I am lacking in empathy, but if I never saw another survey that purported to rank brands by any criteria — value, purpose, storytelling, social media stickiness, commitment to delivering world peace by 2020 and so on — I would be a happy bunny.
They provoke one overwhelming reaction: who gives a flying chuff? What possible use are they? If Mercedes ranks eight places above Audi, do Mercedes brand marketers high five and their Audi counterparts slit their wrists? If Johnson & Johnson sits below Google, PayPal and WhatsApp do its marketers immediately think ‘well, we must forensically examine their brand DNAs and see if we can copy them’?
And so we arrive at the latest meaningless apples-and-pears brand ranking survey, this time Havas’ latest study of meaningful brands.
It defines a meaningful brand as one that has an impact on our personal and collective wellbeing, as well as providing functional benefits. And we all know that meaning, purpose and all that mumbo jumbo is the stuff of the moment.
You can read summaries here or here.
For those who want the bigger picture about meaningfulness and its alter ego, purpose, may I recommend this terrific column on Mediatel written by the excellent Jan Gooding, who brings to bear her many years’ experience at the coal face.
That is not to say there is nothing of any value in the survey. There is, in my opinion, but it is not the headline finding, with which we’ll start.
Havas’ big shtick is that being meaningful is good for business, and that 77% of consumers buy brands that have values they share. Consumers, they say, “will reward brands who want to make the world a better place and who reflect their values”.
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Do they really? I would imagine, if you include every purchase consumers make, they would have a repertoire of well over 100 brands. Is Havas saying these consumers really know the values — whatever they may be — of all these brands. It’s hard to imagine.
Consumers may say they make their purchases on this basis — nothing like a survey for an opportunity for some cheap, zero-responsibility virtue signalling — but to me this just doesn’t stack up in the real world.
Let me generalise from the personal. When I buy petrol, I buy from the first petrol station I pass. I don’t care if it’s Esso, BP or Shell. I’ve been with Vodafone for years — inertia, completely — and I have no idea what its values are or how they might differ from EE.
I buy Yeo Valley milk and yoghurt sometimes because I still remember their famous TV ad and I once passed a sign on a detour off the M5. I use Google all the time because it’s bloody good, despite the fact that I loathe the way it behaves as a corporate entity. The same with WhatsApp, despite Facebook’s off-putting combination of fake piety and hubris.
If I was to examine the contents of my fridge or bathroom cabinet I couldn’t begin to tell you what values the products there claim to espouse, even if they have any, and nor am I remotely interested in — or have the time to — finding out.
And about 90% of my purchases, at a guesstimate, are based on habit, product functionality/superiority or ease of purchase. Zip to do with shared values or the broader sense of meaning.
And I suspect confusion of meaning with functionality is at work in the actual Havas ranking, which mixes what you might call functional, everyday-use brands, with the aspirational. Thus four of the top five places are held by Google, PayPal, WhatsApp and YouTube, with only the aspirational Mercedes (at three) breaking them up. Others in the top 30 that tick the functional box include Microsoft, Gillette, Colgate, Nivea and Vanish Oxi-Action.
If we take the latter, what, seriously, does Vanish do to make the world a better place beyond removing stains? (BTW, it is also in my cupboard and I couldn’t give a monkey’s about anything other than its efficacy.)
But for those who are dubious of the benefits of brand meaning, Havas chucks in the financial argument that meaningful brands outperform the stock market by 134%.
Oh please. For a study that purports to have rigorous intellectual underpinning, this egregious mix of cause and effect is where the wheels really come off.
It’s hard to know where to begin with exposing this as utter rubbish. Is this 134% outperformance against a general benchmark, like the FTSE 100 or the Dow Jones? Is it against a brand’s peers? Over what period? Brands tend not to be publicly listed, but multiple brand owners (e.g. Nestle, Reckitts, Google parent Alphabet) are, so how can the outperformance of a single brand in a multi-brand entity be measured? And stock market performance is driven by many, many factors, the least important of which are consumers and the most important of which are investors, and they are by no means the same thing.
The brilliant Richard Shotton debunks this myth of purpose and share price performance much better than I can here. The points he made then still stand today.
Ok, that’s done with the meaningless stuff. Where the study is more interesting (and useful) is in its examination of the content phenomenon.
Havas rightly identifies content (a loose term, but we sort of know it when we see it) as one of the ways brands seek to build meaning and purpose. It helpfully breaks the role of content into six — educate, inspire, reward, entertain, inform and help. Looking at 1,800 brands, Havas concludes that, via its Content Effectiveness Index (don’t you just love that quasi-scientific label), which measures the strength of content association and performance for each brand, 55% of this content misses the mark.
Personally I could have told Havas this just from a cursory glance at the brand content I see almost every day. Most of it is rubbish and should be consigned immediately to the nearest landfill dump.
If this message gets through to brands and their content teams, then the survey does at least have some redeeming factors. But there’s one thing I’d like to add: brands shouldn’t just produce better content. They should start by producing less.
Spurious job creation, CMA style
The civil servants down at the Competition and Markets Authority have had a busy week. First up, we had the CMA’s provisional ruling on the Sainsbury’s/Asda merger, at which it waved a flag that was more red than orange. Quite rightly too: the merger is a big deal with serious implications across many sectors of the economy and for many consumers, whether customers or employees.
Seemingly on a roll, just a day later the CMA announced its investigation into Global’s acquisition of Exterion, a deal which has no bearing on consumers whatsoever but potentially some on a limited number of advertisers.
Or so it may think, calling as the CMA does for industry comments on whether the deal leads to a “substantial lessening of competition within any market or markets for goods and services”.
Hmm, well. The biggest issue is in defining markets. Together with its purchases of Primesight and Outdoor Plus, the Exterion deal gives Global just under a third of the UK outdoor market, 3-4 percentage points behind JCDecaux. But if share of OOH is an issue, why isn’t the CMA casting its beady eye over Global’s purchase of Primesight and Outdoor Plus as well?
Maybe the issue is London OOH. But here Exterion is about to take a big hit from today’s introduction of the TfL junk food ads ban. Perversely, this is good for non-HFSS OOH advertisers in London since it tips the balance of power marginally towards the buyer.
Or is it OOH and radio combined? But is this really a factor? The biggest issue here might be any conditional selling — i.e. you can’t buy X outdoor unless you buy Y radio, or vice versa — but Global would be very foolish if it indulged in anything like that. Even if it wasn’t illegal, buyers would give it short shrift.
Of course, you can see that the specialists might be less supportive of the overall Global deal since it diminishes their ability to divide and rule the OOH sales points, but it wouldn’t take the CMA long to figure out that this is a peculiar quirk of a unusual market dynamic.
Still, if the CMA does plan to waste its precious time and resources on this kind of thing, it would be better advised to look at the wider media market, and judge the extent to which OOH and radio both compete amongst themselves and then with other players from different media. Of course, radio and OOH have many unique qualities. But they are substitutable if push comes to shove.
My guess is that, after poking around in the entrails of the media world, the CMA will conclude that there is nothing to see here.
The trouble is, as anyone involved in the Nielsen-Ebiquity merger can tell you, this process is immensely time-consuming and disruptive. In the latter case, the CMA poked around for six months before finding — to no-one’s surprise — that there was zip to get worried about.
Cynics on the receiving end of such an investigation may conclude that they are nothing but quango job-protection schemes. As the CMA annual budget period arrives, it thinks: ‘Look, if we find lots of things to look at, then our jobs are safe for another year. Yippee. Trebles all round.’