Kantar partnered with University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School and mined the Kantar BrandZ database to uncover new insight into how brands can maximise commercial returns by identifying the strategic levers to optimise impact.

Brands are seriously funny things. On the one hand, this is a golden age for brands: we’ve never had as much knowledge demonstrating the competitive advantage they deliver to businesses in the short and longer term. And, thanks to the work from Ehrenberg Bass Institute, hard evidence of the importance of reach and saliency in driving growth from sales penetration.

Yet the uncomfortable truth is that these pre-existing models of growth are still insufficient to explain the full contribution brands make to the bottom line, or how to deliver that in practice. Because:

• in a digitally connected economy, transformational brand value can be built differently through experience and innovation
• sales response to advertising is half of what it was
• recently inflation has exposed and amplified the critical importance of pricing power and margin as a commercial lever that successful brands deploy, alongside sales volume

So, it’s time to think differently.