The Study of Brand Magnetism®
How brands attract young consumers in an increasingly competitive world.
Brand Magnetism® is the ability of a brand to attract popular and consistent user-generated content.
Brand Magnetism® goes beyond the momentary nature of cultural relevance; whereas cultural relevance is critical to building Brand Magnetism™, a brand that can reach consistently high levels of cultural relevance is magnetic. It holds such a strong force in culture that young consumers are consistently and organically creating and engaging in conversations around the brand.
In our modern world, those conversations take the form of user-generated content (UGC); the currency of modern brands. When a brand can inspire user-generated content that resonates at high levels (ie is culturally relevant) and can consistently inspire that content over different periods of time, that is Brand Magnetism®.
Magnetic brands stand in a league of their own, driving strong loyalty among consumers, and performing well against both competitors and the market. Relevant brands get considered but are still forced to compete on factors like price, convenience, and novelty.
Magnetic Brands control their own ecosystems - driving pricing power and enabling more creativity, experimentation, and innovation at the core of the business, distancing themselves even further from competitors.
Introducing the Gen Z Brand Magnetism® Matrix.
The Gen Z Brand Magnetism® Matrix provides the competitive positioning of your brand for Gen Z. On this Matrix, brands are classified as either Weak, Functional, Relevant or Magnetic.
How do brands use the Gen Z Brand Magnetism® Matrix?
This matrix should be used as the first step in answering two major questions:
How much pull does my brand have on consumers relative to my competitors?
Where do the opportunities lie to build stronger Brand Magnetism®?
How is the Gen Z Brand Magnetism® Matrix made?
The Gen Z Brand Magnetism® Matrix is the culmination of studies and work around our GenZ Score®, the measurement of a brand’s cultural relevance with Gen Z.
The Y axis is labeled as Popularity, which we define and measure as the following:
Popularity: the average engagement on the top-performing organic user-generated content over time.
We identify brand-relevant organic user-generated content over 4 unique time intervals and measure the average engagement on that content. That average is then placed on a percentile ranking against all brands for those same time intervals. This forms the value for our Y-axis.
The X axis is labeled as Consistency, which we define and measure as the following:
Consistency: the variation in engagement on the top-performing organic user-generated content over time.
While Popularity is a measure of the data’s central tendency, Consistency is a measure of the data’s closeness. By finding the coefficient of variation, we identify the dispersion of the data around the mean; a lower coefficient of variation gives us a lower dispersion, meaning that the data is more consistent. We measure this consistency across each of the four time intervals to find an overall consistency measure that we translate to a point system and map as the X value on this coordinate plane.
How do I build Brand Magnetism®?
Increase your brand’s popularity.
Increase the consistency of your brand’s popularity.
Money does not buy organic user-generated content. Raw, consumer conversations are driven by brands that truly resonate. Sure, influencer campaigns, advertising and well-timed tweets may create momentary spikes in awareness, but the agenda-less voices of our peers sharing their voices, experiences and opinions around your brand create strong, community-driven perspectives that drive conversions, loyalty and ultimately Brand Magnetism.
How do I increase my brand’s popularity?
Use the cultural relevance research methodology (GenZ Score ®) to create and build a brand-specific cultural relevance framework to understand what themes and factors are driving brand relevance in the category.
Strategically apply your industry’s cultural relevance framework to your brand to understand the themes your brand can embrace to drive relevance with young consumers in the category.
How do I increase the consistency of my brand’s popularity?
Deeply understand the evolving needs of the young consumer in relation to your industry
What do current behaviors look like, what role does your brand play for the young consumer, what does the future of the category look like, and what gaps can your brand fill to resonate with the behaviors of Gen Z?
Apply consumer behavior deep dives to your brand’s strategic cultural relevance framework to build a brand that resonates with Gen Z behaviors.