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Successful marketers constantly reposition brands for long-term, accelerated growth, finding new spaces outside their category boundaries and seeking breakthrough innovations. In fact, the most valuable brands in the world create shareholder value faster, resist market downturns and, also manage to weather recessions better than their counterparts.

This resilience is down to the connections such brands make, and how they position themselves. The deciding qualities, according to global research house, Kantar, are that they are "meaningful, different and salient."

Since 1998, BrandZ has shared brand-building insights with business leaders and marketers worldwide, based on interviews with 4.3 million consumers, for 21,000 brands in 54 markets. Kantar BrandZ analysis has proven that businesses that invest in their brands outperform the market, and that investment in marketing remains the most powerful form of defence in times of crisis.

In its latest 2024 survey of the most valuable global brands, brand innovation and finding new spaces for brands that transcended their own categories, were the biggest contributing factors to brand success and future growth – which let’s be clear, all marketers are chasing.

Innovation is at the heart of top brand strategy in Kantar’s first ever global blueprint for brand growth, when announcing its most valuable brands in the world for 2024. The global top 20 brands, in order, are: Apple; Google; Microsoft; Amazon; McDonald’s; Nvidia; Visa; Facebook; Oracle; Tencent; Mastercard; Louis Vuitton; Instagram; Aramco; Coca-Cola; IBM; Hermes; Moutai; Adobe; Accenture.

In a return to growth following the challenges of recent years, the total value of the Kantar BrandZ Global Top 100 Most Valuable Brands has risen by 20% year on year. As Kantar reports: “If there’s one thing the world’s strongest brands have in common, it’s an unwillingness to rest on their laurels."

Today’s top brands – and brand marketing teams – are always looking to accelerate growth, whether that means leveraging insights to raise creative work from good to great; finding new ways to show up impactfully along the path to purchase; or pursuing breakthrough innovations that find new spaces beyond the bounds of their pre-existing categories.”

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Meaningfully Different Brands

At a regional Kantar Brandz event, Ivan Moroke, CEO, Insights Division, Kantar South Africa, commented that brands which were continuing to transcend current challenging market conditions, were meeting the needs of customers “with actions and initiatives that mark them out as being Meaningfully Different and relevant to consumers’ lives today.” He said these strong, forward-focused brands were proving that they can identify what it takes to grow and follow up by implementing programmes to deliver this.

Graham Staplehurst, Director, Thought Leadership, Kantar Brandz, said the blueprint of brand growth is driven by data, informed by experience and designed for marketers. To achieve strong market penetration and growth, brands must be meaningfully different to more people, identifying stronger, functional and more meaningful connections to build difference.

The key proof point for meaningful difference is growth. Five times as many people will buy your brand in a given time period, compared to those brands that are not meaningfully different, added Staplehurst. “A brand should be designed to meet the needs that matter [of their target market].”

Most of the most valuable brands are high in meaning and difference. Those who lack difference, may be vulnerable to disruption, as they lack difference relative to their competitors. “Brands need to find ways to stand apart… on the things that matter,” he said.

Accelerating Brand Growth

Kantar scientists used billions of data points to re-examine – and redefine our thinking on brand growth. After analyzing more than 40,000 brands, they found that having the highest penetration in the market today doesn’t guarantee market share gains in the future, said Mary Kyriakidi, Global Thought Leader, Brand, Kantar.

The main message is that “brands grow by being meaningfully different to more people.” Kantar’s growth accelerators for more effective marketing, are to reach more people; be more present; and find new spaces for your brands:

1. Predispose More People: Invest in advertising and experiences to give your brand a head start in the race to the sale.
2. Be More Present: Make your brand easier to choose and convert that predisposition into profitable sales.
3. Find New Space: Address more customer needs, appeal to more usage occasions, or gauge the possibility of opening new categories. Kantar believes incremental growth will follow.

Mark Ritson, a brand commentator with a PhD in Marketing, from the United Kingdom, explained further that the research data proved that meaningful difference drove more pricing power than brand salience; whereas distinctiveness in a brand made it easily identifiable with customers and top of mind in buying situations.

Relative differentiation is achieved with proper execution and drives growth. Ritson advised brands to say less things; say them more often; say them to everyone; say them across different media; say them with 60% of your budget; and say them with better creative; and to say them across more channels than advertising – in  everything from packaging to distribution to the way the CEO does things, needed to be aligned.

To emphasize his point about brands taking on differentiation as well as distinctiveness, Ritson highlighted Nestle’s KitKat brand with its decades-long strategy: “Have a break… have a KitKat.” “They own ‘taking a break’ and they have been saying the same thing for 50 years. It’s very tight positioning. They say the same thing over and over again across the decades and it only gets stronger.”

Ritson hammered home that Kantar had found that differentiation and distinctiveness could both be present for successful brands, but brands today, needed to demonstrate being "meaningfully different" in order to connect with their market and achieve growth.