Allison+Partners has launched Brandgeist IQ (BGIQ), a first-of-its-kind, proprietary methodology designed to measure the real-time cultural relevance of brands.
Per the release:
Built using numerous data indicators, Brandgeist IQ reveals a single, tangible score to demonstrate a brand’s cultural relevance. The product will illustrate how brands stack up against one another in real time, helping marketing and communications teams identify areas of opportunity and chart a path to continued cultural relevance.
The offering is the latest culture-focused product to come out of Allison+Partners’ award-winning Consumer Brands Practice and a natural evolution of TapIN, the agency’s culture engagement offering that turns trends into actionable brand moments.
If culture had a crystal ball, BGIQ would be it
Brands measured through BGIQ receive a score from 1-100 that assesses how well they perform against five indicators: Plugged into Pop Culture, Disrupting the Norm, Living with Purpose, Always Inclusive, and Modern and On-Trend.
BGIQ also scores competitors so that brands can see how they measure up. Once scored, brands can work with Allison+Partners to use the results to find whitespace, inform campaign planning and develop marketing and PR programming to achieve greater cultural relevance.
Allison+Partners launched BGIQ by scoring 50 of America’s favorite brands, from up-and-coming to iconic and everything in between. These rankings offer a valuable benchmark for brands looking to evaluate their place in cultural conversation.
“We believe brands must live at the intersection of culture and commerce to achieve success, and we do so by collaborating with our clients to create cultural moments, surface meaningful brand truths, and leverage and tap into pop culture,” said Lisa Rosenberg, partner + president, Consumer Brands at Allison+Partners. “After years of creating award-winning work rooted in this belief, we developed Brandgeist IQ to expand our reach to any brand looking to build and maintain cultural relevance, and ultimately drive more brand love.”
How the culture sausage is made
Allison+Partners’ Consumer Brands and Performance + Intelligence teams collaborated with NetBase Quid, a global leader in AI-powered consumer and market intelligence, to build Brandgeist’s proprietary model. Each category of the score incorporates a multitude of data points and calculations. The approach normalizes the robust dataset so that companies of all sizes receive an accurate readout independent of the size of their footprint.
“The speed of culture is constantly evolving, so we wanted to develop a cost-effective solution to show brands how they sit within the context of culture at any given moment,” said Brent Diggins, partner + managing director, Performance + Intelligence at Allison+Partners. “Brandgeist takes speculation and opinion on cultural relevance out of the equation and instead gives brands an opportunity to see where they sit in the cultural zeitgeist and how that may shift over time.”
Brands can either be scored one time to better understand their place in culture at a given moment, or they can select a scoring cadence as often as once a month for frequent pulse-checks on how they are performing amid trending cultural moments. Alternatively, brands can select a bi-monthly or quarterly cadence, with the option to be scored against one or more competitors to understand where they fall on the BGIQ scale and how they fit within their category and the larger cultural conversation.
