Updated: May 6

BrandTrends takes stock of the most popular entertainment brands in the world among 0-14 year olds in January 2023

What leads a brand to achieve worldwide success? What are the winning recipes for adapting to cultural differences, multiple consumer expectations, market constraints, and all the exogenous elements that directly or indirectly influence the perception that marketing targets have of a brand?

There is no single answer to these questions, and the results of the BrandTrends barometer confirm this. Thus, the Top 10 most popular entertainment brands* in the world show a disparity of strategy.

While global brands dominate, it is surprising that LEGO, a toy brand, is also far ahead of its competitors.

Of course, there are several reasons why a person may like a brand:

· Quality of products or services offered: If a brand provides high-quality products or services, customers are likely to appreciate it.

· Trust and reputation: Brands that have a positive and reliable reputation can gain customers’ trust. Customers tend to prefer brands that they know and trust.

· Brand personality: Brands can have a unique personality that attracts customers. For example, a brand may be perceived as innovative, fun, serious, or friendly.

· Brand experience: Shared experience is key. If a brand offers a positive and memorable experience, it can strengthen loyalty towards it.

· Membership in a community: Feeling connected to a community that shares its values and interests is an important reason to attach oneself to a brand.

· Social influence: One may like a brand because their surroundings (friends, family, influencers) also like it. The perception of the brand’s popularity can influence one’s own attitude towards it.

These factors can vary from person to person, but they all contribute to how a person perceives and evaluates a brand.

LEGO activates all of these levers at once. Of course, there is the brand experience, passed down from generation to generation. Creativity, durability, simplicity, and compatibility have been the key words of the small brick since its creation and largely explain its success.

But LEGO is also a global community of fans of all ages who share their passion for the brand’s bricks. Fans even organize events, competitions, and exhibitions to show off their creations.

And most importantly, LEGO has licenses for popular franchises such as Star Wars, Harry Potter, and Marvel, which means fans can build models inspired by their favorite characters. These are all opportunities to reach new audiences and strengthen the relationship with existing customers. The brand has even developed partnerships to be a license itself. This stretching approach to the brand helps to strengthen the relationship with the brand and its image.

Marvel and the others have undeniable assets, activating one or several of these 6 pillars of engagement. But never all 6. Furthermore, several lack transversality: they are very strong among one target audience, but lag behind on another, contributing to the gap. The category to which they belong also has an influence on their performance, subject to a specific distribution and communication strategy.

The brand matrix below, another specific analysis developed by BrandTrends, highlights these differences.

This matrix compares the popularity of brands to their purchase intent. These two indicators are logically correlated, with the first being predictive of the second.

However, there are two types of exceptions.

The first concerns brands with popularity exceeding their purchase intent. This is the case for Marvel. This highlights untapped potential for the brand. Consumers appreciate it widely, and purchase intentions are just waiting to be stimulated by a wider product offering.

Marvel has taken precedence over its superheroes in recent months and has become a source of interest in its own right, reinforced by the dissemination of content on a dedicated Disney+ channel and the release of multiple films. As a result, the BrandTrends rankings have seen Spider-Man, Avengers, Iron Man, and their cohorts plummet, while Marvel continued to progress and reach second place in the global rankings.

The second exception concerns brands with purchase intent exceeding their popularity. This is the case for Mickey Mouse and Despicable Me. This illustrates an appetite for these brands that could be further exploited by enhancing their popularity.

To increase brand popularity and thus intention to purchase, there are several strategies that can be employed, such as increasing brand awareness through communication or expanding the target audience, or the both of them:

· Increase brand awareness by communicating more or expanding the target audience, for example.

· Increase brand proximity by adapting the product offering to the target audience’s expectations or by broadcasting more connivant messages.

· Favor both at the same time by rethinking communication and distribution methods

This is to identify and deeply understand these gaps, and to find ways to overcome them, that BrandTrends measures brand performance four times a year and provides detailed and standardized diagnostics.

* The popularity index is a unique composite indicator developed by BrandTrends to predict purchase intent. By studying brand popularity and its components, BrandTrends helps brands implement winning strategies.