• by Karl Greenberg , Staff Writer, October 9, 2015

It's that time of year. Market research study season is upon us. Wait, there is no season for market research, it's like NASCAR. It's year round! That's a very good thing for me, because so is the news cycle. 

But I sometimes think the market research game is a bit like recreational fishing, where everyone is catching the same fish, over and over again. Studies that rank brands by how well they are trusted, or hated, revered, loved, respected, understood, shared, “felt” etc., are their own brands, after all, and each has a  different skew, different takeaway. But the fish? They don't change. They are the biggies, but not too quick on the uptake, because they keep getting caught and thrown back: PepsiCo, Apple, Disney, Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Microsoft, Nike, McD's. They are alway the most trusted, most loved, most respected, most valued brands, and guess what. You can prove they belong there because their revenue numbers track this or that report's year-over-year delta.  

I have to wonder why any of this actually matters. Or to put it less lethargically, I’m wondering which of these rankings actually really matter. I’m wondering what matters beyond the P/L. Look, if your profit numbers seem to agree with what So-and-So Associates is saying about your brand’s value, then why don’t you just look at your numbers. If you have to go to someone’s survey of 6,000 people to figure out what your brand stands for and, therefore, how well you are doing, you might want to re-evaluate your career choice. 

I dutifully write these things every week, and I'm not denigrating the genus as a whole. I enjoy brand research because each study offers a different take on what makes certain brands ascendant and others in deflate mode. The most useful research looks at how a consumer cohort feels about what a company makes, and something it did. That is fairly concrete and specific enough to have some real-world meaning. But usually it's the other way around. You get the sentiment numbers and then an explanation based on what the company has actually done over the past year. I find “This is how consumers we polled feel about a brand's ‘x’” more useful than “This is how consumers feel about this brand, and this is probably why. And it makes sense because look at their sales numbers.”   

The same brands keep showing up on these top-tens because they are the brands with the most money, biggest marketing budget, most leverage to manipulate how you feel about them, and because they are just frigging everywhere you look. Kind of like pop stars. Especially when you add brand miscegenation, since many are in bed with each other in various kinds of cross-promotional weirdness, or are simply acquiring each other.

Take the Grammys. Please. They are dominated by the same five personalities every year. Plus Kanye. It's an aquarium of the worst kind, where real value is conflated with revenue and popularity. You saw “Taylor Swift’s Girl Squad,” right?  

To flog this one, the top Grammys performers' hits were all written by the same people, if you believe thisAtlantic article. If so, it's as if McDonald's, BK, and KFC, and Wendy's were all getting their burgers from the same kitchen. The only thing that changes is the wrapper. The article says that the hits are also carefully reworked hooks from earlier songs, making the whole enterprise even more soylent, to coin a term. Is the brand-affection game pretty much a consumer-brand Grammys? You have the same cadre hitting the stage every year to collect popularity trophies, don't you? Their popularity is based on their value, and their value is sanctioned by their earnings, which also algorithmically informs their value.

What really matters is how a company responds to perception: an immutable, hierarchical structure that kills transparency is one good way to screw up. We can see that on display right now at a German automaker. "This is about being fundamentally out of step with the consumer demand for more authenticity, transparency and access for the brand," says Jeff Curry, founder of transformation design consultancy Mere Mortals, and former CMO at Jaguar. And, he says, speed and agility matters and big companies have to figure out how to bring this dynamic to their marketing functions.