What makes a good brand?

I am often critical of “best of” or “most valuable” brand reports and lists. My biggest complaint is the predominantly financial focus to the exclusion of other, often more defining, attributes.

This recent Good Brand Report from PSFK offers a different way of measuring successful brands. The criteria of “innovation, environmental consciousness and social policy” provide us with results that contain some of the usual suspects and a few you may not have thought about. Google, Apple, Twitter, Virgin, Facebook, Ikea, Skype – are just a few of the more well known names listed, along with Zipcar and Good Magazine.

The report is a free download – just go here.

What is interesting is their findings on common traits the “good brands” listed share. Utility; Experimentation; Design; Community and listening; Change the model; Beyond the 30 second ad; Environmental priorities.

Can a brand be “good” without holding all these traits? Yes – I don’t believe that there is a prescribed list of attributes that a brand must hold in order to succeed. It does however show that for right now, there are specific things that some brands are doing that are contributing to their ascent. And as such it’s worth thinking about your own business and what role those things have or could have (if any).

However, most significantly, beyond the listed attributes, what each of the listed brands have in common is a relentless and unapologetic focus on who they are. Beyond anything else I believe this is the key ingredient of any successful brand.

There are several organisations on that list that have fairly diverse products or services, however if you look underneath there is still a unifying focus – their core promise or reason for being holds.

Quite simply without that, your brand will likely never reach its potential. So apart from anything else the brands on the good brands list provide something to aspire to in terms of brand focus and execution.

See you next week.

Michel Hogan is a Brand Advocate. Through her work with Brandology here in Australia and in the United States, she helps organisations recognize who they are and align that with what they do and say, to build more authentic and sustainable brands. She also publishes the Brand thought leadership blog – Brand Alignment.