Marketing

Study: Google named world’s “simplest” brand

Brand consultancy Siegel+Gale asked respondents to rate a brand’s simplicity in terms of its communications, products, services, and experiences in relation to peers.
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It’s that time of year when lists ranking brands—most valuable, loved, powerful, you name it—are everywhere.

Branding consultancy Siegel+Gale has added another to the mix. Its World’s Simplest Brands survey gauges, well, how “simple” some of the world’s biggest companies are—at least in the eyes of consumers.

  • Brian Rafferty, Siegel+Gale’s global director of business analytics and insights, told Marketing Brew the company surveyed more than 15,000 people in nine countries, about 2,000 in each market.
  • Respondents were asked to rate a brand’s simplicity in terms of its communications, products, services, and experiences compared to its peers, explained Rafferty, ranking top brands across categories like electronics, retail, and media.
  • Scores were weighted differently depending on responses; for instance, respondents who consider themselves “users” of a particular brand were given more weight than those merely “familiar.”

Marketing Brew talked to Rafferty about the study’s findings + why he thinks certain brands rose to the top.

Top prize: Globally, respondents ranked Google as the simplest brand. But what’s simple about a company that makes literal billions of dollars in revenue each quarter? According to Rafferty, its top ranking could stem from the fact that the “main front of Google,” aka its search engine, hasn’t changed all that much (from a user’s perspective) over the years, even as the company has expanded into different areas. “The general person going onto their Google search bar isn’t actually thinking about all of the other things that Google does,” he explained. Or how much data it’s collecting. 😬

Silver medal: Netflix took second place after coming in first in 2018, the last time Siegel+Gale ran the study. But in the US specifically, Hulu nabbed second, pushing Netflix to third. Rafferty thinks it’s interesting that Hulu did a “tiny bit better,” but he sees the differences between the two as “relatively minimal.” After all, both provide ad-free offerings, which he said contributed to their high scores. “No matter how innovative advertisers try to get, typically consumers don’t like the idea of their experience being interrupted by advertising.”

Commerce: Amazon ranked eighth on the global list and first in the US. Of course, that “simplicity” has come at a cost, as the company’s faced lots of criticism the past couple of years over accusations about how its employees are treated. “There’s lots of negatives about Amazon regarding working conditions and other pieces, so I don’t want to say that Amazon is the end all and be all of everything,” Rafferty noted. “But I do think, at least in terms of the consumer experience, they have been relentlessly focused on always making sure that the consumer is managing to get what they want in the easiest way possible.”

Odd one out: Despite its sleek designs, Rafferty said Apple “never has done all that well” in the study, in part because of its “multiplicity of models” that force people to buy dongles and other accoutrements for its products to function properly.—MS

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Marketing Brew informs marketing pros of the latest on brand strategy, social media, and ad tech via our weekday newsletter, virtual events, marketing conferences, and digital guides.