Client: BrandZ

Goal: Make BrandZ famous

Our idea in a nutshell: Use the brand rankings as a springboard to hold meaningful conversations about brands and the value they provide to businesses. Insights from more than 16 brand valuation rankings throughout the year are ideal fodder for creating stories about the performance of individual brands as well as broad business, marketing and category trends that are powerful talking points and news hooks.

Execution:

• Create news stories around the rankings tailored to key business, marketing and category audiences. By tailoring the news we significantly amplify the buzz, particularly around the main ranking of the BrandZ Most Valuable Global Brands.
• Develop stories that can be drip fed to the media throughout the year based on major themes such as China and technology innovation as well as business trends such as challenger brands shaking things up.
• Newsjack key events such as China Singles Day.
• Thought leadership articles and opinion on key trends from all BrandZ research appear throughout the year. At least one article a month is authored by a BrandZ spokesperson in key marketing and business publications.

Results:

• Successfully communicated key messages through increased traditional and social media coverage.
• Coverage in key global business outlets including the Financial Times, CNBC, CNN and Bloomberg appears almost every year.
• Enhanced engagement with brands (both clients and prospects) with opportunities to ‘join the conversation’.
• More companies are including recognition of the ranking on their own websites (Eg. in Vodafone’s annual report and news stories on the websites of Accenture, AT&T, BT and IBM. Many others showed off the ‘Proud to be in the Top 100’ logo on their websites and other materials.

Impact for Kantar and WPP:

• Telling brand stories that reach thousands of people has reinforced the brand expertise of Kantar and WPP. BrandZ drives client conversations and revenue across both businesses.