Bennett’s 10 Top Brands of 2014

As we enter the Autumn season and some of us start to think about Christmas and the New Year, co-founder and chief creative officer at ZAK Media Group Matthew Bennett shares his thoughts on which brands have had the best 2014.

So where to start? Well let’s start with success. What is it? Is it sales? Is it saliency? Is it change? Well it depends on what the challenge is, success is relevant. Not only to the dreaded YOY acronym, but to whatever waters your good ship brand, has been sailing recently in these choppy waters of post austerity/not quite recovery.

My top 10 list (so far) is based on overcoming whatever challenge or indeed embracing whatever opportunity that presented itself to a brand. I personally favour brands that solve their big problems with agility and still leave room to take opportunities that inevitably come along during the course of their fiscal year.

In no particular order…

1. There’s no denying that Dacia has had a successful year. The Renault owned former Romanian state automotive company has managed to get not one but two cars on British roads and actually sell them. They have one small family motor for which the base spec costs less than the price of a decent two week family holiday. There’s also a 4x4 for under £9k that actually won Scottish Car of the Year! If Dacia’s challenge was to literally ‘sell some cars’ (and I think it would have been no matter what the strategy said) then BOOM, they’ve done it.

2. Next up is WhatsApp. What’s up with WhatsApp? It went from a few people using it as they grew out of arranging riots on Blackberry Messenger (i.e. for free) to something that my clients use, my friends’ kids use, and even my mum uses. Everyone has cottoned on to the fact that it’s a free, usable, poppy, alternative to our everyday iOS and Android native standards and ‘old fashioned’ texting. It only has minor functional benefits over text and email, but somehow it’s caught the crest of a wave through just being good to use. The brand doesn’t market (or do they?); it doesn’t make a song and dance like Apple, it just releases the odd update and lets us get swept up with the tidal wave of users. Oh, and Facebook bought it for $19bn. What was its challenge? Capitalisation. Big tick.

3. Ask David Moyes and he’ll tell you Manchester United had an annus horribilis on the pitch but the club managed to secure the most lucrative technical partner (or kit to you and I) deal on the planet. Adidas, obviously higher than a kite on the success of its World Cup campaign, signed the American owned ‘soccer franchise’ (and yes as a Liverpool fan I’m aware I’m treading on thin ice here) to a ‘guaranteed’ £750m 10 year deal. Well done the commercial team at United. Time will only tell whether that’s a good deal or not for Adidas. Winning things on the pitch is not the only way to make a football team commercially successful around the globe but it definitely helps. 

4. British Airways deserves a mention with its modern and very classy multi channel To Fly. To Serve ad campaign really focussing on its service as a differentiator. This proposition in an industry where many operators, and certainly all long haul operators, focus on its service as being the one thing that makes it different, still elevates British Airways above the competition, which was, is and forever will be their challenge. The campaign and its success in placing BA ever nearer to our hearts and minds has been a factor in the brand’s performance and the maiden dividend of its parent group International Airlines Group.  

5. Another campaign that caught my eye and signifies success for the brand was The Game Before The Game from Beats by Dre. The brand was bought earlier this year by our good friends Apple for the not so insignificant sum of $3 billion (I bet former shareholders HTC wish they’d have hung on to their share). Not too shabby for Beats I would say. Although it doesn’t reflect well on Apple’s business strategy when it has to resort to buying cool. (Gone are the days when having a white headphone lead was cool, now everyone has Apple’s product as their back-up when they forget their real ‘phones). But that’s not Beats’ problem, Beats’ ‘problem’, a lovely problem to have, was how does it utilise the investment wisely this year? And being a World Cup year, it made sense to spend some of that $3bn on endorsements from an incredible roster of talent featuring the likes of Neymar Jr, Luis Suarez and Cesc Fabregas. Now, Beats have become the Bentley Continental of the headphones world. Brash, flash and demonstrates having disposable cash.

6 & 7. Talking of disposable cash brings us nicely onto Lidl and Aldi. The budget supermarkets have had another great year taking a bite out of the big boys. A great TV campaign from Aldi comparing its unknown euro-brands to the household favourites with a wry, dry and bleakly British humour has put the brand front of mind for value seekers, and only as I write I see Lidl’s clever response to Sainsbury’s faux pas of putting a staff incentive poster on their windows, perfectly demonstrating that responsive, clever social marketing is eminently shareable. So well done both, bit by bit, step by step, consumer by consumer we are being convinced that named, known brands don’t always equal quality.

8. A brand that was initially facing a similar challenge of being an unknown quantity when it comes to quality was Netflix. From the outset, the on-demand streaming service has ‘resold’ great programming. It then started to acquire productions such as the Machiavellian political heavyweight House of Cards and recently moved into producing its own with The Square being its first piece of original programming to be nominated for a 2014 Academy Award and a headline film slated for 2015. This year it broke through the 50m global subscribers barrier, and the service is now available through more devices than any other. Progress indeed when you think ill fated video rental chain Blockbuster turned down a deal to buy Netflix for $50m in 2000. Another story of rue and regret.

9 & 10. I think it would be remiss of me in a World Cup year to not mention the phenomenal efforts of the world’s two biggest sportswear brands. There has been much debate, and I’ve had my say, about who was the more successful, sponsor or the hijacker, but competition aside for one moment, both Adidas and Nike put in a monumental shift before and during the World Cup. Decamping to Rio (such a chore) to be in the thick of the action, both marketing teams (and their agency partners) created some amazing and inspiring work. Not all of it hit, I have to say, and too much of it was too similar to each other, but the planning and hard work that went into both teams’ content was second to none. It’s interesting to take a view every four years and it shows us consumers just how much our expectations have changed from big TV campaigns to omnichannel, everything everywhere, a challenge to which the German Jumbo and the American Hulk rose admirably. It also piqued my interest to see runner up Puma wait until the World Cup fuss had died down (and the Adidas and Nike marketing budgets had been burned) to launch its new cross sport proposition of Forever Faster. A smart move.

So that’s my 10 brands that have had a good 2014. But the year is not yet finished. Yes every brand marketing team in the country is head down, planning and figuring out how to do more, better and different next year but for the opportunists, with good creative partners producing good creative ideas, there’s plenty of time left to make 2014 a successful year. Whether they do or not all depends on your definition of success.