The Connected Brands Index

Here’s a quick word to introduce our Connected Brands Index that has been making the headlines recently in the UK.

The research, which identified Google as the ‘most connected’ brand of Interbrand’s top 10, was conducted by iCrossing in the US – with plenty of input and support from the team here in the UK. It is based on the model of Connected Brands that iCrossing has been working with for the past 12 months.

The Connected Brands Index is iCrossing’s grand unification theory of measurement that starts to look at a brand’s effectiveness online – not just on their own properties, but also across search and social media. It accounts for the five attributes we believe make up a successful brand online: visibility, usefulness, usability, desirability, and engagement.

The first thing to say is that the newest research does NOT tell us the most connected brands on the web as the survey measured only the top 10 global brands according to the Interbrand study. However, now that it’s done (though it will constantly evolve), it is a benchmark against which any brand or set of brands can be evaluated.

As we rapidly become a full-service agency, with creative services sitting alongside our core competencies in search and social, we considered it important to be able to measure the effectiveness of campaigns across all digital activity – both onsite and offsite. And, following on from the US research, we’ve found it useful as a competitive benchmarking tool that has already helped some of our clients. We’ve found it can be used in its entirety or for benchmarking around the 3 disciplines of search, site and social independently. ‘Visibility’, for example, naturally focuses on search;  ‘usefulness’, ‘usability’ and ‘desirability’ are about the effectiveness of the user experience of a brand’s online properties; whilst ‘engagement’ applies to its endeavours in social media.

There are 65 different metrics used in the Connected Brands Index and while even this is by no means exhaustive, we do believe it’s a robust collection of metrics that provides valuable insight based on both industry best practice and our own experience of online evaluation.

The key is to realise that the research is not about enabling or informing strategy but for benchmarking performance against competitors and how that performance develops over time.

So, for more information on our Connected Brand Index, download the full research, tell us what you think and feel free to get in touch with more feedback and questions.

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