Brand practice in the MEA region – the science-based state of the art

Landor’s Ash Banerjee and Himanshu Pal explore how data science is transforming brand strategy, design and performance across the Middle East and Africa, sharing five lessons from six years at the forefront of the practice.

What on earth could a world-first sovereign biopharma company, a top-20 global airline, two of the top-five African multi-market telecommunications groups, a leading UAE bank and a leading Levantine bank (both operating internationally), the largest international foods company from the Middle East, the region’s largest sports company, the largest baby products retailer in the region, a leading Saudi healthcare group, a sovereign real estate developer and a leading quad-play telco in Armenia possibly have in common?

All of them turned to us to employ data sciences as essential inputs into the brand development process. Their asks ranged across quantitatively assessing alternative brand positioning and identity solutions in transformation contexts, or uncovering opportunities for brand-led innovation, and/or helping them reshape their organisational cultures through a brand lens.

This is the science-based state of the art of sophisticated brand practice in our region. Together, we’ve been at its leading edge over the last six years, and here are the five things that we’ve validated along the way.

1. Data helps shape differentiating brand strategy

Brand equity rooted positioning development shaped by brand performance data on key choice drivers and other consumer decision factors is essential to informed brand strategy development. It allows us to frame sharper, more differentiating brand positioning concepts, then test and benchmark them against data from BAV (BrandAsset Valuator – the world’s largest proprietary brand database). The data also helps us optimise brand portfolio architectures for easier consumer navigation and greater commercial impact. The facts take opinions and subjectivity off the table and give C-suites de-risked confidence to defend their decisions before their boards.

2. Data on organisational culture is usually revelatory

Leadership groups and management teams know that organisational culture is a key driver of business performance. Beyond a few adjectives however, most may not know what their cultures are really like, and they benefit from quantitative assessments which uncover aspects of their cultures which they may not even have known about. A fact-based culture assessment helps leaders shape the culture they would like to foster by giving them a baseline as the point of departure, and a tracking mechanism to assess progress periodically. 

3. Design doesn’t have to be merely subjective or tasteful

We decompose brand identity elements by their distinctiveness and their relative contributions to overall brand equity, enabling us to make informed recommendations in brand evolution, rebranding, and M&A contexts – across the elements which should be retired, retained or evolved. Our creative colleagues find this immensely helpful, and our clients find it extremely instructive – because the data allow us to go beyond “the logo needs to change” to “here’s how the identity should evolve”. Data can indeed drive brand design, and it does so in ways which drive brand differentiation and brand equity preservation and growth.

4. Business-modelled brand choices drive commercial performance

The sole purpose of having a brand is to make money whilst serving customer needs and segments in differentiated ways. Using a brand’s commercial performance data, we model the relative impact of alternative brand positioning and architecture constructs on their respective abilities to drive long-term commercial performance across revenue, profit and valuation. We also model brand investment levels to optimise RoI, ensuring that our clients realise maximal returns in a time of zero-based budgeting and a general focus on costs. All of this allows brand teams, C-suites, and Boards to make wiser fact-based decisions which help their brands and businesses be more successful over time.

5. Brand is an organisational asset, not merely a marketing instrument

The impact of brand extends well beyond the marketing discipline into an organisation’s people, business partners, other stakeholders, partnerships and sponsorships, corporate citizenship efforts and more. Brand is a central business-driving asset and its strength and stature must be measured so that leadership teams can monitor progress, calibrate their brand-building efforts, and continue deploying their brands to drive commercial performance in the most optimal ways. Brand-mature organisations often ask us to design an overall (if not several) brand metric(s) for their corporate balanced scorecards.

AI isn’t the only factor driving fundamental change in contemporary brand practice. Quantitative methods to maximise brand effectiveness have been around longer and have already come into increasing practice in the MEA region. They bring with them data, insights, econometric modelling, pathway illumination, risk-reduction, certainty and more. The wiser client teams ask us to use them to create disproportionate marketplace advantages for their brands. This is the science-based state of the art of sophisticated brand practice today – globally, and in our region.