Dubai: A common sight in kitchens and supermarket shelves, the powdered milk brand Nido, has been named among the UAE’s most “intimate brands” for 2018. It sure does rate as the surprise package in a Top 10 dominated by car brands and tech giants.
And then there is Emirates airline, the lone brand of domestic origin and ranked sixth in the list put together by MBLM, the branding agency. At the top is Apple followed by Lexus, BMW, Mercedes and Toyota in that order. In seventh spot is Nido, ahead of Nikon, Samsung and Ford.
This is the third year in a row that Apple has held the top spot in the UAE, and it had a similar position in the agency’s rankings for the US. The positions are based on a “fusion score”, which measures among other things how willing consumers are to pay a premium to own a particular brand. (For instance, all those who were willing to sign up for an iPhone X even before Apple listed out the specs — that’s what brand intimacy is about in a nutshell.) So, how does intimacy translate into advantages for brands and their marketers? In MBLM’s analysis, “Top intimate brands deliver superior results related to revenue and profit growth, suggesting the importance of emotion in driving the world’s leading brands.”
- William Shintani | Managing Partner at MBLM Dubai
Interestingly, it’s the first time that Emirates has been ranked in the Top 10. Through the eight years MBLM has come up with these listings, overseas brands have tended to dominate the consumer consciousness.
“Emirates airline has always been a top performer among certain audiences like millennials and consistently placed at top of the travel industry,” said William Shintani, Managing Partner at MBLM Dubai. “The brand has doubled its fusion score (the highest stage of intimacy) since 2017 — this means that they are doing a great job creating and maintaining emotional bonds with their customers.
“Emirates is demonstrating its strength in building bonds with customers, in specific the 25-34 year old demographic.
“As a Dubai resident and frequent flyer of Emirates, I’ve witnessed changes in the services available to me, from more personalised communications and special offers to a greater attention to service throughout every journey.”
But Nestle-owned Nido’s presence does come across as an unprecedented choice. It came in first among the 25-34 year old demographic and seventh overall with 51 per cent of Nido customers reporting a state of brand intimacy, said Shintani. (Clearly, the millennials in town do give a thought to brands outside of digital or automotive.) Lexus’ No. 2 standing overall also has the capacity to surprise some. But all those Lexus E350s operating as part of the Careem and Uber fleets sure has raised the brand’s visibility.
That there are no Top 10 spots for digital or social brands — be they local or global — will raise questions.
To which Shintani has this answer — “I have no doubt that there will be online platforms that will capture our hearts and become extremely intimate brands. To use specific examples, Dubai Now is an essential application for any resident of Dubai — extremely functional and efficient. Souq.com and Noon are all developing bonds with their customers, not to mention all the other online services platforms such as Instashop and Deliveroo.
“Whether or not they use emotion at the core of their communication efforts will determine whether they develop into intimate brands. I think there are still opportunities for local online platforms to create greater intimacy with their customers. If you think about the three fundamental domains — essence, story and experience — there are opportunities in all three for these digital platforms to augment their brands.
“That said, there will still be brands that are going to engage with their customers outside of the (digital) platform space. We’re still going to have needs that are not covered in the virtual worlds — from physical transportation to daily necessities, entertainment and others. All of these will be brands with which we will form emotional relationships, some more intense and essential and some less intense and easily exchangeable.”
The journey to being an intimate brand
• The MBLM rankings measure the extent of a brand’s interaction with its audiences through three stages — sharing, bonding and fusing, which is the most intense. Sharing occurs when the person and the brand engage and interact — knowledge is shared and the person is informed about what the brand is all about.
• Bonding occurs when an attachment is created and the relationship between a person and a brand becomes more committed. This is a stage of acceptance where trust is established.
• Fusing occurs when a person and a brand are inexorably linked and “co-identified”. In this stage, the identities of the person and the brand begin to merge and become a form of mutual realisation and expression.
