Dive Brief:
- Accenture Interactive released The Love Index 2016, a methodology used to gauge which consumer brands people love the most, according to a company press release. The Love Index is based on a five-point criteria for brands: fun, relevancy, engagement, social capability and helpfulness.
- The study, done in conjunction with Fjord, Accenture's design and innovation unit, covered the U.S., U.K. and Brazil. Netflix, Apple, Google, Microsoft and YouTube (which is owned by Google) were the most loved brands overall, although only Netflix made the top three in each country.
- The Love Index found Netflix, Fitbit, Amazon, Apple and Facebook are leading the U.S. market for brand experience, which means consumer interactions with those brands raise their expectations for additional products and services.
Dive Insight:
Accenture's new study on brand love reinforces that the future is digital, both for consumers and for marketers. Brand Key's loyalty leaders report from last month found 80% of the top 20 loyalty brands are now digital. Brand Key's front-runners included Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, Facebook and YouTube, a group that overlaps with Accenture’s.
The growing loyalty dominance of digital brands bears interesting implications, as Accenture notes that consumers are raising their expectations for the services a given company can provide. Offering a single product or solution to consumers might be an antiquated business model heading into the future.
“In an era of digital disruption, we expect to see brands ‘stretch’ themselves across one or more dimensions to differentiate and keep pace with experience leaders,” Nan Nayak, Fjord’s managing director of design strategy and head researcher, said in the release.
Consumer preference toward key brands like Google and Facebook isn't likely to change any time soon, either: Gartner predicted last month that by 2021, all activities an individual engages in over the course of a day will involve at least one of the current top-seven digital giants.
