by Tanya Gazdik
Source: www.mediapost.com, June 2024
Jeep, Ford, Levi Strauss, Coca-Cola and Disney are once again taking the top spots in a survey of the most patriotic brands in America.
Brand Keys’ 23rd annual Most Patriotic Brands survey has identified 2024’s top 50 American brands consumers feel best embody the value of “patriotism.”
“Consumers now view everything through a political lens, so the value of patriotism is more important than ever,” says Robert Passikoff, president of Brand Keys, the New York-based brand loyalty and engagement research firm that conducts the annual survey.
While the annual Brand Keys survey focuses on for-profit brands, assessments for the Air Force, Army, Coast Guard, Marines, and Navy are included. “Consumers rated the armed services #1, as they have since the survey was first conducted,” Passikoff says.
Nearly all (80%) of consumers think patriotism is important despite partisan politics and consumer protests. For this year’s survey, 20% of nominated brands are new including Mattel, Converse, Oreos, Target, Heinz, Revlon and Home Depot.
To determine national brand rankings, a sample of 7,460 consumers, 18 to 65 years of age, balanced for gender and political affiliation, assessed 1,381 brands in 143 B2C, B2B and D2C categories. Evaluations were based on Brand Keys independently validated emotional engagement measures, which identify how well brands resonate for the value of “patriotism.”
As the consumer marketplace has gotten more partisan, Brand Keys has developed a more rigorous statistical analysis to isolate the value of “patriotism,” Passikoff says.
“It may be redundant for me to say this, but consumer engagement with ‘patriotism’ is entirely emotional,” Passikoff tells Marketing Daily. “It’s a near-instantaneous reaction that people have. They automatically connect all the dots, factor in the history and heritage of a brand, and unconsciously recognize how much the brand stands for that single value.”
As consumer-to-brand outreach has become more automatic, more social and more instinctive and intuitive, it’s critical that if a brand wants to be felt to be patriotic they need a real emotional underpinning to accomplish that, he says,
“History matters. The past and the present, in real time and as it relates to consumer experience,” Passikoff says. “If there’s such a thing as ‘patriotic DNA,’ certain brands have it and it shows up in our psychological emotional assessments. Which is why Jeep shows up at the top of the list every year. The thing is, you can’t just ask people if a brand is patriotic. Sure, you can get a ‘yes’ or a ‘no,’ but it’s a tough value to articulate, particularly today when the consumers and the consumer marketplace are more tribal and political than ever before.”
