Last month, Brand Republic and Harris Interactive published their Kids Brands Index 2011, showing the top household brands among 7-15 year old British children. Based on research with 4,000 kids, the index ranks the top brands in 12 categories, based on their levels of awareness, cool factor, recommendations and overall desirability, among others.

The index makes for essential reading for any marketer dealing with kids’ brands, but also for any business targeting a family audience. So read on to discover five points that struck us, here at The Value Engineers’ Kids practice:

• Of the Top 20 brands, only four actively position themselves as ‘kids’ or youth brands. Of those four, only one has made it into the Top 10 – Haribo, which comes in at #7. While the result might seem surprising to those unused to kids’ marketing, it reflects the diversity among different age groups. The one thing that unites kids aged 7-15 is that all aspire to being older. Looked at in this light, it’s no shock that the #1 brand is Walkers, followed closely by The Simpsons and McDonald’s. All are mainstream brands that pride themselves on an almost universal appeal.
• Six technology brands hit the Top 20, including websites, gaming consoles, mobile phones and A/V. This will come as no surprise to parents of tween- or teenagers, who are used to fending off requests for the latest new technology, but does go to prove the ubiquity of tech among this demographic. Having said that, Apple’s iPhone was the only mobile brand, reflecting kids’ technological aspirations rather than their everyday reality.
• Nintendo came out far ahead of its competitor console brands, with the Wii at #5 and the DS at #9. Compare this to its closest competitor – the Xbox Kinect at #45 – and it’s clear that Nintendo’s strategy of extending beyond the core gaming audience is still paying off.
• Just one retail brand and one ‘fashion’ brand (GAME and Nike respectively) managed to slip into the Top 20, despite the much-cited appeal of brands such as Jack Wills. It’s likely that this reflects the different maturity rates of boys and girls, with boys becoming interested in clothes and other forms of self-expression at a later age, but also the segmentation of the sexes – boys won’t identify with a so-called ‘girls’ brand.
• Finally, it’s interesting to note that the first ‘toy’ brand only enters the list at #18 with LEGO, showing how justified is the toys & games industries’ concern about children growing out of the market ever more quickly.

Full results are available courtesy of PR Week via the link above, and are well worth a look. In the meantime, I’m off to McDonald’s for some first-hand observation…

In a world where there is often too much information, sometimes a single statistic or figure cuts through and registers with you.

I learnt one such fact today – there are now more Subway restaurants around the world than there are McDonald’s. Food for thought and a thought for food?

(For those who like more than less,  there are now 33,749 Subways and 33,737 McDonald’s)

He’s been nobly fighting off the Romans since 1959 but it seems Asterix, along with his faithful chum Obelix, has finally met his match: the Americans. Or, more precisely, McDonald’s.

A recent poster advert by the American fast food megalith has been the cause of the controversy. It depicts the famous Gallic cartoon duo merrily larking inside a McDonald’s restaurant. Innocent enough, some might say. But it is the symbolic significance that laces the picture which has caused outcry in France.

Asterix is second only to De Gaulle in the list of noble protectors of French independence.  He is also one of the country’s most successful exports, with 325 million copies of his books sold in over 100 different languages to date. Yet here Asterix and Obelix, those devourers of wild boar and quaffers of ale, are trapped under America’s golden gates. And, worse of all, in the belly of the fast food beast they are, sin of sins, happy!

Aside from the tongue in cheek tone with which this story has been covered in the media, there is a serious point. Any international brand looking to penetrate a foreign market cannot simply ignore the cultural friction which their presence might create. Geo-politically relations between America and France have been on the rocks throughout this decade, most notably over Iraq. Lingering frustrations over America’s perceived arrogance have been clear on the continent for some time. Add to this the period of introspection France is going through currently over the makeup of its national identity – the public debate over the burka and discussion after the World Cup failure of the nation’s multiracial football team being two recent examples – and the sensitivities are clear. In fact, McDonald’s should have already seen first hand some of these brooding sentiments when it opened a branch in the Louvre, Paris’ artistic heart, last year. Judging by their latest foray, they didn’t learn their lesson.

Communicating a brand successfully in a foreign country is an unenviable task - building up an engagement and appeal with a nation whose cultural touchpoints and associations are unfamiliar. Furthermore, these subtleties are ever changing; in 2001 Asterix briefly replaced Ronald McDonald as McDonald’s spokesman in France, yet no one blinked an eye. Sadly for McDonalds, they got this one wrong. But lets give them some credit – at least they didn’t show Asterix eating Freedom Fries.

There’s nothing revelatory about the idea that ethnic foods are becoming more popular with mainstream consumers, or that consumers are seeking out more exotic flavours in food and drink. Witness Mintel’s flavour predictions for 2010, which touted traditionally ethnic ingredients such as cardamom, hibiscus, cupuaçu and rose water as emerging flavours of choice for US consumers.

Now, McDonald’s has taken ethnic marketing one step further, using African Americans, Hispanics and Asians to shape products and communications that the company then rolls out to its white, middle-class audiences.

According to McDonald’s US CMO, Neil Golden: “The ethnic consumer tends to set trends…So they help set the tone for how we enter the marketplace”.

While the fast food giant still uses specialist agencies to create communications tailored to minority ethnic audiences – particularly African Americans - it then increasingly puts mass-market spend behind them. A recent article in Business Week examines what it calls McDonald’s ’minority-shapes-majority’ strategy in more detail, and is well worth a read.

McDonald's recruitment ad targets African-American communities

The traditional model of marketing to minority ethnic communities has revolved around one of two things. In one, a mainstream company tailors its communications – and in rare cases, its product – to so-called niche audience using the services of a specialist agency. In the other, a specialist manufacturer finds their success in appealing to minority markets can translate to the mainstream, and adopts their communications accordingly.

McDonald’s decision to reverse the dynamic of ethnic marketing may not seem like a great leap forward at first sight, but it’s a strategy that could have a dramatic impact on FMCG markets in both the US and the UK.

Inevitably, success will see imitators riding the wake of the Golden Arches in the US. But with changing tastes, social trends and culture over the past decades showing that the ‘salad bowl’ analogy is becoming as ripe for the UK as the US, there’s an opportunity for the real fast movers to remove the ‘niche’ from ethnic marketing – and potentially find themselves ahead of the trend.

For those interested, the Business Week article can be found here – and is well worth a read.

McDonald’s have frequently been in the firing line of the media and lobby groups with regards to their Happy Meals and today has witnessed a further dramatic twist. Whilst many extreme lobbyists have called for an outright ban on the Happy Meals such a move has largely been regarded as very unlikely; not so it appears in the US county of Santa Clara (which covers most of Silicone Valley). Elected officials have introduced a law that bans the provision of toys with any children’s meals that fall short of national nutritional guidelines, hence eliminating a central component of the Happy Meal.

Whilst the toy element is vetoed, of course the food itself will still be available and given that all other fast food outlets in this area will cease offering similar incentives, it is unlikely therefore to affect the popularity of fast food within the county (where one in four children are obese, which is higher than the US average of one in five). McDonald’s is popular with young families because it provides food that all members of family enjoy at a price that is affordable and in an environment that is family friendly. Sure, the children may be surprised and disappointed not to receive their usual toy but I doubt that this will act as a stimulus for them to grab a carrot stick and jog around the park (although perhaps a few children may burn off a few calories if they jump up and down in anger).

Once again politicians are clutching at policy straws to address the obesity issue and hitting easy win targets to publicly demonstrate their commitment to the health & well being of their voters. If only social and behavioural change was that easy!