Welcome to the Stagwell Marketing Cloud x Harris Brand Platform monthly brand report.
Every month, we take brand data from Harris Brand Platform, a brand health tracking tool, and highlight the brands you should have on your radar.
Let’s dive in:
What if I told you that a Star Wars Lego set you bought for $99.99 in 2003 could be worth nearly $10,000 today if you decided not to open it and save it for posterity?
Here’s to hoping that’s you.
While Legos have long been perceived as toys—giving children an opportunity to stretch their imaginations, build new worlds, and leave hard pieces of plastic in places where you’ll inevitably step on them in the middle of the night—they’ve also become coveted collector’s items or even toy sets you proudly display on your bookshelf in lieu of a sculpture.
And Lego’s recent releases, tied closely to fandoms with an appetite for merch (think BTS, Lord of the Rings, Dungeons & Dragons), are sparking interest among a new group of consumers: Gen Z.
Lego’s 2023 numbers show that their momentum is on fire with this new cohort. Harris Brand Platform’s content strategist Catherine Ake dug into the numbers.
“From Q4 2022 to Q1 2023, Lego experienced a +11.3 lift in brand equity among Gen Z adults. In contrast, the toy brand experienced a -1.2 drop in brand equity among the general population of US adults. While Lego also experienced growth among Millennials (+6.0), Lego saw the greatest drop in brand equity among Baby Boomers (-11.4), highlighting a divergence in Lego’s popularity between younger and older adults.”
Although we don’t know what Lego’s future has in store, the brand’s increase in equity among Gen Z importantly hasn’t stopped at just being aware of the product—they’re also trialing Legos. While 74% of Gen Z respondents had tried Legos towards the end of January 2023, about a month later over 85% had used the product. From here, it’s all about continuing to push them down the funnel, creating true brand evangelists.
Read the rest of the Legos case study here.
“Jams keep jammier, ham keeps hammier, cakes keep cakier, flakes keep flakier.”
Do you ever have trouble keeping your food…foodier?
Started in 1946, Tupperware is one of those unique brands that has been adopted as a full product category. It doesn’t matter if you’re using food storage containers made by Rubbermaid or Pyrex: chances are you refer to it as Tupperware. Like its counterparts Band-Aid and Kleenex, Tupperware is ubiquitously known to be the name for a plastic container perfect for storing leftovers, but the brand (the first of its kind) has decades of history to its name.
One of the original MLMs, Tupperware’s sales were built on the backs of suburban housewives who hosted “Tupperware parties” where guests could buy the products directly from the host after experiencing the quality in real life. Before the internet enabled the rise of direct-to-consumer brands, Tupperware found a way to sell to their target audience without a storefront or formal distributors.
This method of selling was so successful for Tupperware that they didn’t launch an e-commerce site until 2019.
That’s pretty wild.
But the last couple of years have been anything but breezy for the brand. Since April of this year, Tupperware has missed deadlines for at least two financial reports, and there’s been chatter about a pending bankruptcy.
Let’s see what Ake from Harris Brand Platform found as a potential canary in the coal mine for Tupperware.
“We can see Tupperware’s disconnect with younger consumers in their Harris Brand Platform data. Tupperware’s brand equity is higher in older consumers than younger consumers across almost all components of brand equity (+10.5) – familiarity (+18.2), quality (+18.8), and consideration (+17.5). The sole exception is momentum (-12.9). Interestingly, younger consumers more often said that Tupperware was gaining momentum than older consumers in Q1 of 2023.”
Tupperware needs to find a way to resonate with younger buyers if they’re going to get back on track. So far, collaborations with brands like Vera Bradley and Prime original The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel (along with an in-store partnership with Target) are a step towards bringing more cultural relevance to the food-protecting containers, but it may take more to win over the allegiance of Gen Z. Step one may be pushing IRL Tupperware parties from the cul-de-sac onto TikTok, where #tupperware has 1.2B views.
Read the rest of the Tupperware case study here.
Imagine this: You’re 7 feet tall and wear a men’s size 15 in shoes. You make about $10M a year and may take up to 100 flights between October and June. You stay in hotels for a good fraction of that time as well.
Any guesses who you are?
You’re the average NBA player!
And Hotels.com is your organization’s official travel partner.
While Hotels.com has been formally involved with the NBA since 2020, a recent suite of television ads played up the partnership during NBA All-Star Weekend with a plan to continue through the end of basketball season.
The humorous skit starring Sam Richardson and Ike Barinholtz as bellhops highlights some of the issues an NBA player might encounter at the average hotel: Short beds, tiny robes, slippers that would barely cover Lebron James’s big toe…you get the bit.
The message? Hotels.com has you covered to make sure you have whatever you need to make your travel experience a game-winning 3-pointer with one second left on the clock. So how did the ad resonate with NBA fans?
Harris Brand Platform’s VP of data products Zeke Hughes dug into the numbers to find out.
“Hotels.com’s Harris Brand Platform sales conversion funnel data suggests that the commercials caught the attention of NBA fans.
Above, the graph compares the percentage of NBA fans who say they woulda recommend Hotels.com to the percentage of overall US adults that would say the same. While NBA fans consistently recommend Hotels.com more than the general population of US adults, this gap widens throughout Q1 2023.”
Creating ad content with a specific audience in mind and meeting them where they spend their time is a worthwhile investment. NBA fans were nearly 10% more likely on average to recommend Hotels.com than the general population at the beginning of March 2023.
