• by Aaron Baar , November 4, 2015

It isn’t enough for a brand to be emotionally connected with consumers, it needs to understand and meet expectations (i.e., be useful) to thrive in the modern marketing climate. 

“In a world where there are so many choices and consumers are so overwhelmed, usefulness is a measure they are using,” Ben Gaddis, chief innovation officer at T3, tells Marketing Daily.

T3, an independent creative marketing agency based in Austin, Texas, has developed what it calls the “Useful Brand Score,” which evaluates brands on 14 consumer expectations (ranging from association, value, safety and quality, to trust, friendliness, and confidence) as a measurement of a brand’s usefulness.

“It’s almost a 50/50 split. Half [the qualities are] about how a brand makes you feel, and the other half are about how it performs,” Gaddis says. “You have to combine relationships and performance to be useful for consumers.”

In the inaugural evaluation, Amazon topped the list of the “50 most useful brands,” followed by Band-Aid, Google, Kleenex and Visa. While the entire list (available here) is a varied mix of companies, expectations can differ depending on company offerings, industry sector and customer demographic. (Millennials, for instance, rated Google as the most useful brand.)

“In different spaces, people have different expectations,” Gaddis says. “Maybe Millennials don’t have as much disposable income [to rate Amazon #1], or maybe it’s because Google is more present throughout their lives.”

Regardless, a brand’s useful score is a measure of understanding how well a brand may be in meeting consumer expectations. As an index, it can help brands determine what they’re doing well, and what they might need to do better. In a market where technology has changed the way consumers interact with brands, knowing understanding expectations is an important measure to keep pace, Gaddis says. 

“Being useful means you know what your customers expect,” Gaddis says. “If you don’t understand what customers think is useful, you’re going to have a hard time meeting these expectations.”