Terms like “purpose” and “brand love” have been bandied about for years, mostly in feel-good speeches at marketing conferences. But now Omnicom Media Group is trying to inject these soft and fuzzy concepts into the hard world of media planning.
OMG—whose agencies include Hearts & Science, OMD and PHD—struck a deal to get data from BERA, which calculates brand equity and purpose scores for some 4,000 brands globally based on consumer surveys. OMG’s agencies will use the data to identify brand purpose strengths and weaknesses segmented by audience, location and time period and then use the findings to refine and measure media planning and ad targeting based on these factors.
Of course, “brand purpose” is as elusive as it is popular, with the buzzword meaning different things to different people. BERA relies on longtime purpose evangelist Jim Stengel, former chief marketer at Procter & Gamble, who defines it as “why your brand exists beyond making money.”
BERA teamed with Stengel’s consultancy to define 13 purpose attributes that affect brand equity. They include cultural relevance, societal commitment, emotional connection, inclusivity and personal connection. The purpose scores feed into BERA’s larger brand health metrics that can be segmented by consumer demographics or geographical factors.
BERA uses a so-called “love curve” to track where brands are on the spectrum—rising and in a “dating” phase, or falling while suffering from consumer boredom and even “divorce.” Each brand is assigned a “love score”—from zero to 100—and these scores can be isolated to see how a brand is fairing within a particular region of the country or within a specific population, such as Black Americans, for instance.
“It removes a lot of the guessing game in how do you create a winning position in the marketplace,” says BERA CEO Ryan Barker.