• by Karl Greenberg , November 5, 2015

Companies that adjust quickly to market changes and product demand, keep an ear cocked to consumer input, and act on it do well financially. Brand strategy and design firm Landor has launched a first-ever study that looks at which companies lead in innovation, and adjust with celerity. 

Samsung wins in the first-ever Global Agile Brand Study. That means the Korean device maker beat Apple, which was ranked sixth. The other brands right behind Samsung are all known for innovation: Dyson, Google, Wikipedia, and Android. YouTube is right behind Apple. Microsoft, Ikea, and Disney round out the top-ten. 

Landor says the six key traits are principled, adaptive, responsible, multichannel, global, and open. And the traits are represented in areas like product development, advertising, and customer interaction. 

The firm says the results derive from an analysis that begins with the firm's BrandAsset Valuator (BAV), a database of consumer brand perception data, which Landor used to determine an initial list of brands. 

Suzanne Hernandez, executive director of research and analytics at Landor, tells Marketing Daily that the study tracks 48 perceptual attributes garnered from around 50,000 consumer respondents around the world, and links them to in-market financial performance. “The reality is that the brands that are strongest in BAV are also top financial performers over time.” 

Microsoft had been relegated to stodginess and prone to product issues, partly in contradistinction to Apple. But Landor notes that it still leads in software, even with the failure of Windows 8. Thomas Ordahl, chief strategy officer at the global branding agency, tells Marketing Daily that the company looked at actions companies are they taking to adapt. National Public Radio, surprisingly, was a top brand in the study. 

With regard to Microsoft, he says: "After the launch of Windows 8, which largely failed, quickly changed it to be much more user friendly. "And they have done a lot in general to move away from being an enterprise-oriented business. When we look at Millennials, a number of them are very impressed with how Microsoft responded to negative feedback of the previous Windows release. They have won over a group of consumers and customers who maybe dismissed them; they are listening.

Landor says the brands that scored high on agility were placed on an initial list of contenders. Qualitative analysis of contenders’ in-market behavior and consumer research with Millennials narrowed the list to 10 and determined the six agile behavior traits. 

Samsung won because of innovations like the 3-D and curved TVs; and through its applications. The firm says Android exemplifies “Be together. Not the same,” its brand mantra, attracting diverse users by allowing them to customize their Android experience. Wikipedia is about as open as a brand can get, allowing users to create entries, and it is in 291 languages and is used by 440 million people per month, the firm notes. 

In addition to besting Bing and Yahoo in search, Google is also getting into autonomous cars and may actually make Google Glass usable. Dyson, which started as one man, now has 1,000 engineers worldwide with a range of products, and says it will invest one billion pounds to develop 100 new products over the next four years. 

Apple -- like Google -- is also getting into the self-driving car business, but will do it in a way that extends its core equity around sublime user interface and beauty in simplicity. Landor notes that Apple's aesthetic extends to advertising, recently around iPhone6 photography, with its Shot on iPhone6 campaign about personal expression. YouTube has only been around for a decade, and that speaks for itself. Landor notes that YouTube is naturally agile because it is fueled by user-generated content. But, with its own major studio in L.A., Google is also now hosting its own content.

Disney, which has enjoyed mega hits like “Frozen” -- and with its theme parks, drive enormous tourism numbers for entire regions, the state of Florida, for instance, which is among the top global tourism destinations.