Forbes features Cristina Barranco on The Success of Brands
OMD EMEA
18 November 2022

Originally published in Forbes Spain

The world has changed drastically in recent years and there is no doubt that it will continue to do so. Before it was the pandemic, now it is inflation and tomorrow it will be another trigger.

What does not change is the need for companies to adapt to the consumer and to new changes in behaviour as that “is what business success depends on,” says Cristina Barranco, general director of OMD Spain.

Communicating is “a guarantee of continuing to occupy a place in the mind of the consumer, of becoming relevant in their life”, doing so is no longer optional, but mandatory. When the company doesn’t talk, consumers do it for it.

That is why she assures that at OMD “we always work with a double dimension, business and communication, they are communicating vessels” and keys to the growth of the company.

Relevance, a new measure of success

And how to do this effectively? Until recently it was enough to have good notoriety, to be a well-known brand. For Cristina Barranco “notoriety is no longer enough as an indicator of the success of a brand, you can occupy the top of mind in the mind of the consumer and, nevertheless, not be in their shopping cart”, which is what it is all about.

Faced with this measure, “we saw it necessary to find more specific indicators and developed ‘Pulsing Brands’, a study that measures relevance as a new indicator of success, and with which it has been discovered, among other things, that “it builds purchase intention to a greater extent than notoriety, with a correlation coefficient three times higher”.

This relevance is “multifactorial” and encompasses aspects such as “the usefulness of a brand to respond to a need, the bond capable of building, the emotional connection, the ability to meet expectations, to give the brand meaning or by affinity and identification with the brand”.

Therefore, notoriety and relevance are key factors to work in a company.

In this new context “our mission is to help brands occupy a place in these different dimensions”. And we do it by designing communication solutions that incorporate these new metrics, and are focused on growing our clients’ business, while helping to accelerate the transformation thanks to all the knowledge we have of consumers.”

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