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Lucy Nixon

Lucy Nixon

Best Global Green Brands of 2014

green globe green brandsInterbrand has released its ranking of the best global green brands in 2014, and the results might surprise you.

What brands come to your mind when you think of “green.” What about when you think about the broader term of sustainability?

I’m going to guess it’s not Ford, but that is the #1 brand on the Interbrand 2014 ranking of the best global green brands.

Back in 2012, I wrote a post here for Corporate Eye that discussed why so many automotive brands ranked high on Interbrand’s ranking of the 2012 best global green brands. In short, a significant part of Interbrand’s ranking system relies on consumer perception of brands. Automotive brands invest large amounts of money into promoting their green initiatives, and they’re rewarded with higher consumer perception scores in Interbrand’s ranking methodology.

In 2012, eight of the 21 brands on Interbrand’s list were automotive brands. In 2014, only six of the top 21 brands on the list are automotive brands. However, this year’s list includes 50 brands, and 10 of them (1 in 5 or 20%) are automotive brands. In fact, there are more automotive brands on the list than brands from any other industry.

Here is a breakdown by industry of the 50 best global green brands of 2014:

  • Automotive – 10 brands
  • Technology – 2 brands
  • FNCG – 6 brands
  • Electronics – 5 brands
  • Diversified – 3 brands
  • Sporting goods – 2 brands
  • Beverages – 2 brands
  • Apparel – 2 brands
  • Restaurants – 2 brands
  • Financial services – 2 brands
  • Home furnishings – 1 brand
  • Transportation – 1 brand
  • Energy – 1 brand
  • Media – 1 brand
  • Alcohol – 1 brand

In addition to consumer perceptions based on six key criteria (authenticity, relevance, differentiation, consistency, presence, and understanding of environmental claims), brands are also evaluated based on publicly available information related to governance, stakeholder engagement, operations, supply chain, transportation and logistics, and products and services.

Based on consumer surveys and analysis, the top 10 best global brands of 2014 are:

  1. Ford – automotive
  2. Toyota – automotive
  3. Honda – automotive
  4. Nissan – automotive
  5. Panasonic – electronics
  6. Nokia – electronics
  7. Sony – electronics
  8. Adidas – sporting goods
  9. Danone – FMCG
  10. Dell – technology

Four of the top 10 best global green brands of 2014 are automotive brands and four are electronics brands. One is a sporting goods brand, and one is from the FMCG sector. Is that surprising to you?

Looking on the positive side, it’s good to see so many companies that you wouldn’t expect to find on a list of the best global green brands actually investing in green initiatives. From the brand perspective, promoting their green investments is certainly paying off in terms of improved consumer perceptions. In the end, improved consumer perceptions lead to sales, so getting on this list is a success for each of the companies that prioritized green initiatives over the past year.

Below is a video introduction from Interbrand that provides an overview of what the ranking is and why it’s done.

What do you think? Leave a comment and share your thoughts about the list of the best global green brands in 2014.

Image: Sebastian Bergmann licensed BY CC-SA 2.0

Investor: Understanding annual reports

bt-annualNot every first-time investor understands the annual report. BT offer a page about ‘understanding annual reports’ to explain the structure of the annual report, and what the key financial information is about.

Combined with their AGM page, which includes clear statements of the rules surrounding AGMs, this information is helpful to new investors.

Google+ Turns 3 Years Old

google plus icon watercolorGoogle+ will be three years old on June 28, 2014 (Google+ brand pages won’t turn 3 until November 8, 2014), and a new infographic from DPFOC is filled with facts and stats about Google’s latest attempt at social networking.

As you can see in the infographic, Google+ has over 300 million users, and while that is a very large number of people, it is still only a quarter of the users that Facebook has. Furthermore, Google+ has a very large number of inactive accounts.

Google+ also has a more targeted demographic of users — predominantly males in technology or related fields while Facebook’s users come from all fields and are split almost 50/50 between males and females. Google+ also suffers from poor navigation that makes it seem more intimidating and less user-friendly than other social networks.

However, those negatives only tell a small part of the story for Google+.

Looking on the positive side, Google has seen great success in using Google+ as a tool to support its social search functions and to integrate its various products more closely. Google has also gotten far more information about users from their Google+ profiles and use of the Google +1 button across the web. According to the infographic, the +1 button is used over 5 billion times each day and websites that use the +1 button have three times more visits on a daily basis than sites that do not use the +1 button. Furthermore, the average Google+ user spends 12 minutes on the site per day, and the Google+ mobile app was the fourth most used mobile app in the latter half of 2013.

In other words, Google+ might be a long way from competing with Facebook, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been a success for Google. Remember, Google’s core brand mission isn’t to be the world’s biggest and most popular social network. It’s to organize the world’s information. Google+ is just one part of making that mission a reality.

What’s ahead for Google+? Only Google knows the answer to that question despite the many rumors that have circulated in recent months (some of those rumors are mentioned in the infographic). One thing is for certain, Google won’t hesitate to kill a product that isn’t adding value to its mission. However, Google+ seems to have more value to give. What do you think?

You can see all of the statistics in the infographic below.

DPFOC IG Google Plus

Image: Tanja Scherm licensed CC BY-SA 2.0

Careers: Interns confirming brand messaging

ge-internsGE promotes a video created by interns at GE (after a month) on the University Students landing page.

This video not only promotes their internships as valuable experience for students, but also reiterates the ‘imagination / inspiration’ keywords of the GE brand.

Luxury Hotel Brands Prioritize Mobile Marketing

ritz carlton luxury hotelLuxury brands are prioritizing mobile marketing more every day. Luxury brand mobile apps are common today, but luxury hotel brands are still struggling to find success with mobile consumers.

According to The Digital IQ Index from L2, luxury hotel mobile sites are lacking fundamental functionalities that are offered by online travel agent mobile sites like Kayak, Travelocity, and Expedia. Consumers want to quickly and easily find and book a hotel using their mobile devices, but luxury hotel mobile sites are inferior to online travel agent sites in almost every way.

Specifically, L2 found the following factors lacking in luxury hotel mobile sites:

  • Too many clicks are required to book a room using luxury hotels’ mobile sites.
  • Many luxury hotels’ mobile sites are only offered in English.
  • Mobile luxury hotel sites don’t offer enough reviews.
  • Many luxury hotels’ mobile sites don’t offer maps.
  • Many luxury hotels’ mobile sites don’t offer full-screen images.
  • Many luxury hotels’ mobile sites don’t offer video.
  • Fewer than one in two luxury hotels’ mobile sites offer information about local activities or travel guides.
  • Many luxury hotels’ mobile sites don’t offer form auto-fill.
  • Nearly two out of three luxury hotels’ mobile sites don’t provide swipe functionality or tablet-optimized calendars.

As you can see from the problems listed above, there is a great deal of room for improvement for luxury hotels’ mobile websites, particularly since 83% of luxury hotels simply transfer their desktop sites to the mobile environment. Many of the features that consumers actively look for, such as reviews and full-screen images, are offered by online travel agent sites. Furthermore, most luxury hotels’ mobile sites don’t provide auto-filling of information for forms. Booking a room and having to re-enter information multiple times using a smartphone creates a terrible user experience. It’s not surprising that the majority of mobile consumers book hotel reservations through an online travel agent. Kayak and similar sites offer all of the features that consumers want when booking travel, and it’s all easily accessible in one place.

Not only are luxury hotels missing the mobile opportunity by creating inferior mobile sites, they’re also missing out on traffic and conversions. According to L2, 94% of first-page booking listings on Kayak are filled by online travel agents. Only 1.3% are luxury hotel brands. Considering there were 1.6 billion searches conducted on Kayak last year, you can bet that the lack of first page listings for luxury hotels resulted in significantly fewer direct bookings.

Even mobile apps are imperfect for luxury hotel marketing. Property-specific apps can look great and offer many unique features, but a company with many property locations would need to create separate apps for each property. Not only is this cost prohibitive, but few consumers would download more than a few apps from the same hotel brand. Creating a single app for all properties poses its own set of problems. The number of clicks to find information and book a room must be minimized, all content must be up to date, and speed, convenience, and security must be front and center for consumers.

The good news is that 89% of luxury hotel brands plan to invest in mobile sites in 2014, which is up from 63% in 2013. However, those investments won’t help boost sales significantly unless the new mobile sites offer the features listed above that consumers want and are used to getting from online travel agents.

Image: meHolidays licensed CC By-ND 2.0

Careers: Evidence of international experience

hsbc-international>Most companies now provide some information about the experience of a few of their staff, to try to give potential recruits an idea of what life might be like. HSBC have added a widget to the sidebar of these pages showing where this individual has worked.

This is a neat way of demonstrating that working internationally is a genuine possibility.