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…

There is no doubt that some of the world’s best known and most valuable brands have taken much of their inspiration from their biggest competitors.  The growing profile of south-east Asian companies has brought this into focus – they avoid creating and developing original brands for fear of being ripped-off, such is the lack of IP protection in countries such as China. In these emerging economies, there is also greater consumer loyalty to established and familiar global brands. This is because of the relative lack of shopping experience of the south-east Asian consumer, meaning they are less familiar with ‘own-label’ or ‘retailer’ offerings.

This is in stark contrast to consumers in the UK or other ‘western’ countries. The power of retailers combined with the experienced consumer means own label is the norm, with many becoming ‘brands’ in their own right. ‘Finest’ from Tesco or ‘No7’ from Boots are great examples of this.

Consequently, despite having less income, consumers in emerging markets are actually more brand loyal. Companies such as Li Ning, the biggest Chinese sportswear company, appear to have taken inspiration from two of their more established competitors, Nike and Adidas. Their logo is strikingly similar to Nike, while their slogan ‘Nothing is impossible!’ is effectively the same as Adidas’ ‘Impossible is Nothing’.

This underlines the difficult situation of brands from emerging economies in the face of their dominant rivals. While Li Ning have been successful to date, it will be interesting to see if we continue to see home-grown brands seemingly  imitate their more established rivals or risk originality as the far eastern economies grow.

Strolling through the tube tunnel at the South Kensington station I noticed an ad poster in which a young, strong-looking bloke is looking right at me with more than a glimpse of attitude. The bold tagline proclaims ‘I AM THE RULES.’ The NIKE swish in the corner of the image seems to belong there – this is precisely the fierce, youthful and defiant campaign we have come to expect from this brilliant brand.

As I prepare to trot on through the freezing tunnel, the poster right next to it catches my eye.

In it, the guy is also young and oozing urban cool and confidence. A prominent shrift declares a stunningly similar-sounding line: ‘WE ARE LONDON.’ But this second ad is not Nike – it’s Adidas.

You could argue that because the bloke in the Adidas ad looks more laid-back and is not looking at you in such an assertive way, the message is different. However, there is another Adidas poster right next to these two, in which a guy does look straight into the camera with the same insolent look in his eye as the Nike bloke.

After about 20 seconds of contemplating these adjacent posters I decided that there is after all a difference between these campaigns: Nike is more crisp, innovative and cosmopolitan, whilst the Adidas campaign is more rooted in London street culture and thus has a rougher feel to it. But seriously – how long does an average consumer spend looking at ads, let alone actively seek out to distil their essence?

Both of these leading sports brands have successfully developed exciting, eye-catching but most importantly – indistinguishable – poster campaigns. At The Value Engineers we often talk about how our focus on brands rather than consumers adds a competitive edge to our clients. If ‘customer-centric’ marketers working for competing brands all talk to the same target group and analyse their research data in the same rigorous way, all brand managers end up with the same output and brands begin to lose their differentiating qualities.

Let this be a lesson to all of us.

“I want to tell you a story…” The power of a good story has long been recognised. Scherezade managed to keep herself alive for 1001 nights by leaving her stories unfinished overnight, keeping her husband, the young sultan in suspense. This winter, in the 7 days leading up to Christmas, Director Giles Lury shares 7 festive branding fables and the marketing morals they espouse.

THE TATTOOED ANKLE

Phil Knight and Bill Bowerman met at the University of Oregon. Phil Knight was a student and Bill Bowerman was the athletics coach whose dedication led him to make running shoes by hand for his star pupils. In 1957 they founded Blue Ribbon Sports and began selling high-tech, low-priced shoes out of the back of a van in California.

In 1972, the company was renamed after the Greek goddess of victory and adopted a new logo designed for the company by a student. Nike and the famous red swoosh are now be instantly recognisable all over the world.

However like most rags to riches stories there have been downs as well as ups. Most notably the bad publicity surrounding the claims about poor working conditions of Asian workers producing shoes in China, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam for which Phil Knight publicly apologised. Other ‘downs’ have included plateau-ing sales of trainers, increased competition from old stagers like Adidas and claims that Nike put undue pressure on Brazilian coach, Mario Zagello, to play an unfit Ronaldo in the 1998 World Cup Final against France.

That Nike has come through these is in no small part down to its key employees. Their designers are recruited from a range of backgrounds, not just from art schools. Employees come from transportation design schools, architectural design and even occasionally NASA. They are well looked after at Nike’s headquarters in Beaverton, Oregon. It’s a 75 acre site that’s home to sports centres, gyms, design studios and marketing suites as well as various lakes, small woods, restaurants, cafes and a day care centre for employees’ children.

Nike’s greatest asset however is the fanatical loyalty it engenders amongst these employees. A few years ago a sceptical journalist working for The Sunday Times was being shown around the headquarters. He asked about the apocryphal stories of dedicated workers having the red swoosh tattooed on their bodies. The man conducting the tour was Nelson Farris, the Corporate Education Director, who promptly rolled up his trouser leg and said ‘You mean like this?’

The moral of the story is: the best brands come from within, the first target audience for any brand should be its own employees.

Individuality, performance, innovation – these are three words that athletes, fashionholics, and branding professionals across the world associate with Nike, the American athletics megalith based in Beaverton, Oregon. Nike mixes material technology, performance monitoring, and consumer-customizable products across a huge range of kit – from football boots to jumpers. Yet where can we actually find the roots of this approach? What drives the ‘Nike’ experience?

The answers lie in the running-roots of Nike. Co-founder Phil Knight was an athlete under Coach Bill Bowerman at the University of Oregon. The ‘Bowerman’ system turned out Olympic athletes, future track coaches and internationally competitive collegiate runners. Within this milieu of running, workouts and competition the innovative, product-focused Nike emerged.

Bowerman (below) surmised that light, tailored footwear would be the key to athletic victories. He set about experimenting with the famous ‘waffle’ design by pouring liquid urethane into waffle iron (literally!) Eventually, Knight sold these shoes out of the back of his car throughout Oregon. But Nike does not owe its growth just to product design; Bowerman’s articles and books on running helped spawn the jogging phenomena of the late 1960s. It was a product within larger community, then, that propelled Nike from two blokes selling shoes to a Fortune 500 company.

Nike’s corporate history of design, innovation, and performance underlies its current approach. With the ‘Nike + iPod’ athletes can track the length and duration of their training. Athletes can then post their workouts on Nike-led social networking sites from London, England to Lincoln, Nebraska. Nike offers more than shoes: it provides consumers with the chance to connect to a community of runners every day.

A ‘product-community’ approach still drives Nike’s strategy 50 years on. Nike’s founders created a corporate culture that is focused on the whole customer experience – from the store to tallying gains and losses. As social media becomes increasingly tied to product promotion and experience, Nike’s formula, forged decades ago, should drive growth in the future.