Independent creative idea company Barkley announced today the release of its fourth annual State of the Whole Brand report and research study, State of the Whole Brand 2023.

Twelve brands ranked in the top quintile across key measures: Apple, Fenty Beauty, Nike, Louis Vuitton, Google, Headspace, Rare Beauty, Burberry, Samsung, Gucci, Dawn, and Calm.

This year’s research comprised 6,000 consumers and 184 brands spanning 25 categories. It evaluated four key measurements:

° Whole Brand Index (WBI): It assigns a single value to the total set of all actions a brand takes when it enters the market. It’s an independent variable.

° Coefficient of Variation (CV): This measures the variability within the WBI. The lower the CV, the more consistent the brand is in its behavior.

° Market Performance Average (MPA): This measures how well a brand performs in a competitive market, i.e., its business results (consumer-reported). It’s a dependent variable.

° Purpose Index: This measures how strongly a brand operates with a purpose beyond just making money. It’s one thing to make a rhetorical claim that purpose is important; the Purpose Index is designed to prove it can be measured.

As the report explains, a whole brand is an organization that treats everything it does as the brand. All of a brand’s actions inside and outside of the organization – how it acts and speaks to its employees, customers, consumers, communities, and stakeholders – communicates to the world what the brand stands for and what it values.

“Most organizations measure a brand’s success in the rearview. With this research, we can predict it — why certain brands dominate the market and win with consumers,” says Chris Cardetti, Chief Strategy Officer, Barkley. “We measured entire organizations across multiple dimensions that match how people — not marketers — really experience brands, with insights and starting points any brand-builder can use.”

The report maps out solutions to current challenges with insights, research and case studies. A comprehensive toolkit for CEOs, CMOs, Chief Brand Officers, Chief People Officers, this year’s study builds on the momentum of the previous years and is unique in that it encourages others to take the learnings and use them for themselves. It also includes a self-assessment for brands to score themselves against the study’s indices.

Key Findings from the 2023 study include:

  • The Whole Brand Index, an aggregate score on products + services, culture, CX, design, and marketing, explains almost 60% of a brand’s performance in a competitive marketplace, proving that the more whole a brand acts, the more it wins.
  • The top quintile of brands score 86% higher in consumers’ net willingness to pay a premium price and 68% higher in being the most preferred brand in their category.
  • Purpose is the single biggest accelerant contributing to daily market success, not a long-term aspiration.
  • Prioritization is the hidden advantage of building a whole brand.



Article provided with permission from AppleWorld.Today