There was a marvellous Time Out ‘Overheard in London’ a couple of years ago: “My boyfriend says he’s so-so about Marmite. Who is buying all the Marmite? Someone clearly is. I love Marmite, but a medium sized jar lasts us about a year. I often wonder how Marmite makes a profit. Marmite has worked hard to leverage its iconicity to drive sales. At that point, everyone agrees, The Rolls Royce of cars is… Rolls Royce. ‘Mercedes’, ‘Audi’, ‘Ferrari’ are often mentioned, until I ask them about Rolls Royce. I occasionally (rather mischievously) ask people to name the most premium brand of cars. The ‘Rolls Royce’ of any category is the premium, most sumptuous, most luxurious and most desirable thing in that category. Rolls Royce, of course, is the iconic brand of all iconic brands. Meccano has the same kind of resonance, but it now languishes lower than Marmite. I’ve included Lego because, although it’s a Danish company, it is iconic in its use in the UK. It may be a surprise that Land Rover is bigger than Harrods or Lego. Many people refer to British Rail as if it still existed. The NHS, though known across the world, is misunderstood to a more or less maximum level by many Americans.īritish Rail was abolished in 1997, and yet still manages to keep up with the others. My wife, being Dutch, cannot fathom the attachment to 1970s BBC children’s programmes for people of a certain age. Interestingly, they are almost opaque to non-Brits. You might argue that the BBC and the NHS only represent themselves, but they are used in such an all-encompassing fashion that it’s hard not to list them as iconic. Cadbury vies with the Post Office for the number of times it’s mentioned, and it is clearly one of Britain’s best loved brands, but it represents a particular kind of confectionary, not confectionary as a whole. There are quite a few other candidates for iconicity which have a huge influence on our culture, but which generally only represent themselves. You can’t simply refer to ‘John Lewis’ in a piece of writing and expect everyone to know what set of ideas and feelings you are referring to. John Lewis does nearly as well as Harrods, and is definitely on its way to iconicity, but it is not quite there yet.
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Tesco is actually mentioned in writing more in 2008 than most of the others (excluding the BBC and the NHS, which dwarf everything), but Tesco is not iconic because it can’t be used as a representative type. All these are brands which, in Britain, are unique in their fields. I should explain the jiggery-pokery here. In order, the top ten brands are BBC, NHS, Post Office/Royal Mail, Land Rover, British Rail, Harrods, Lego, Rolls Royce, Marmite and Ronseal. It’s fitting to mark some of the businesses or products which have become symbols in their own right because one of them will shortly be no more. Mercifully, no one has yet got a system for getting that into published books.īecause iconic brands change only on a generational basis, there isn’t a good time for publishing lists of them. If you tried the same exercise with the Internet as a whole, you would get a snapshot of how hard people are working to beat the system, using ‘Search Engine Optimisation’. Books are the way to go here, because they are much less susceptible to fads and trends, to PR and marketing, to deliberate product placement, and to reviews. To the rescue, then, Google Ngram viewer - a way of searching the text of hundreds of thousands of books. We just need to look at what writers are writing about. With that in mind, it’s actually not at all difficult to quantify and track iconic brands. The ‘mail’ icon for your email programme works because it’s obvious (more or less) what it is. If we discount its usage for Russian religious paintings, the term refers to brands which are so widely understood that they can be used to represent other things without confusion. If they don’t, they aren’t iconic.Īctually, ‘iconic’ doesn’t mean that long sentence I mentioned. Iconic brands stay iconic for a generation. The second is that iconicity is not particularly volatile. It is naturally hard to quantify ‘iconic’ if it means that. The term is often used to mean ‘really, really, really very good and big and everything and like, well, so totally up there with the others’.
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The first is that ‘iconic’ needs a bit of definition. The algorithms for each of the tables are proprietary, and secret (and may well involve a lot of jiggery pokery to produce the ‘right’ answer) but we seldom get lists of iconic brands. There are annual tables of the coolest, most profitable and most popular brands for the world, the UK, and even for market niches.