Clear Digital Digest: brands, baskets and bears

Hi and welcome to the first Clear Digital Digest for a while, as the Clear Digital blog returns.  More about that here but as before, these summaries will select a range of recent interesting, insightful and sometimes quirky ecommerce, marketing and media stories and break them down into handily digestible form. 
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​Today we’re looking at some new research on the world’s largest brands, the increasingly polarised nature of the UK retail market plus a novel way to socially distance ahead of lockdown restrictions further easing this weekend…

AMAZON REMAINS THE WORLD’S MOST VALUABLE BRAND, BUT FACEBOOK FALLS

• Kantar announced their latest BrandZ global brand value top 100 list this week, with Amazon’s $416bn value remaining ahead of Apple for the second year running, and actually growing faster too. 
• Kantar’s ranking reviews the year to 7th April 2020 and the top 10 is dominated by tech brands as the table below shows. 
• One standout from the top 10 is that Facebook’s brand value of $147bn actually fell by 7% year on year, likely the result of growing unease over Facebooks’ operating methods (e.g. the Cambridge Analytica scandal) plus declining popularity amongst younger users. 
• With the current advertiser backlash and #StopHateForProfit boycott led by the likes of Unilever and Coca-Cola plus a turbulent year ahead on several fronts, it will be interesting to see how this affects Facebook’s brand value and overall profitability this coming year.

Source: Kantar/Marketing Week

Methodology: Kantar’s BrandZ valuation process takes the financial value created by a brand in US dollars and multiplies it by brand contribution, to calculate its Brand Value: the worth in dollars that each individual brand is tangibly worth.
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• On the flipside, there is better news for Facebook in the list of fastest rising brands in the top 10, with Instagram the second fastest growing, its $41.5bn value up by 47% on the prior year, making it the 29th largest brand overall. 
• Many of the biggest growing brands are again tech companies, as is the highest entry in the top 100: TikTok, whose brand value of $16.9bn sees it enter the list at number 79. 
• The full BrandZ report is available from Kantar here.  

Source: Kantar/Marketing Week

RETAIL’S CONTINUING DIVIDE
It’s been another unfortunately contrasting week of winners and losers in the retail space.
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• Sainsburys announced bumper sales growth of 8.5% for the quarter ending 27th June.  This was boosted by a huge (but not unexpected) 87% growth in online orders, which grew to 650,000 per week, up from 370,000 the year before.
• Sainsburys’ grocery business overall grew by 10.5% in the quarter, with general merchandise sales growing by 7.2%, boosted by a 78% rise in Argos home delivery sales.
• Kantar have had a busy week, also publishing some data for the grocery market covering a similar period, showing how online growth continues apace.  Food ecommerce sales grew by 91% from mid May to mid June, a figure that would have been even higher had delivery capacity existed to meet the unprecedented demand.
• And as we’ve all no doubt experienced, it’s not just the supermarket giants benefitting, but also smaller convenience stores and corner shops.  Sales at independent retailers have grown by 69% in the last 3 months.

• However, for non-food retailers, the outlook generally remains bleak, with casualties this week including TM Lewin permanently shutting all its 66 stores and Harveys falling into administration.
• Having only re-opened 22 of its 50 stores since “non-essential” shops were allowed to open on 15th June, John Lewis announced plans to shortly re-open 10 more, including its flagship Oxford Street branch.  However, this still leaves 18 John Lewis department stores with uncertain futures and an internal letter to staff warned that store closures and job cuts were likely, with chair Sharon White stating that “the difficult reality is that we have too much store space for the way people want to shop now”
• Further bad news this week from retailers including Harrods, Arcadia and Upper Crust owners SSP led to papers such as The Guardian focusing heavily on the story, headlining “Fears grow for UK high street as more than 6,000 jobs lost in a day” on its front page on Thursday.

• If all that sounds overly depressing, this excellent Econsultancy article “7 factors that will shape ecommerce in the second half of 2020” does at least offer some cautious optimism, for those retailers trading online that are able to flex and adapt to this constantly changing environment anyway.

AND FINALLY…

As Clear Digital returns this week, I’ve just published two deeper dives as well, both examining the marketplace sector.  This is an area that has actually benefitted to some degree from the present turmoil, with recent stories including Etsy doubling its sales in April and music marketplace Discogs seeing usage levels increase by 65%.

1. The UK marketplace sector – and the role of community.   The UK marketplace sector is responsible for a third of all ecommerce sales - and 2020's unfortunate events have seen a large rise in sales and sellers.  This blog examines the sector's size, dynamics and the increasing success of community-driven marketplaces.
2. Discogs – the digital success story of the vinyl revival.  Discogs is a digital brand with a difference; it’s thriving in the hugely competitive music sector, by catering to a niche but dedicated sector of music enthusiasts and record collectors.   This blog reviews the current music market as a whole, delves deeper into the second hand vinyl market and then examines Discogs’ offering and recent success.

 
And finally, with (some) pubs set to reopen this weekend – and mixed views as to what this will bring – I did like this novel solution from across the Channel that I discovered on Twitter this week…