Consultant questions valuation of charity brands
Howard Lake | 31 January 2007 | News
Advertising and marketing consultant Andrew Papworth has cast doubt on the recent publication of ‘The UK’s Most Valuable Brands 2006’ by consultancy Intangible Business. Writing in the latest edition of his occasional free newsletter ‘Harvest’, he argues that the same methodology for evaluating high street brands can not be applied to the diverse organisations that make up the charity sector.
Intangible Business evaluated and ranked 100 UK charities and claimed that Cancer Research UK had the most valuable charity brand worth £209.2 million, a rise of 3% on the previous year, ahead of the National Trust and Oxfam.
Papworth argues that the same methodology can not be used to evaluate organisations as disparate as the Wellcome Trust, the Arts Council, the British Council, the British Library and the Church Commissioners on the one hand, and Oxfam, the RSPCA, the RNLI and Barnardo’s on the other.
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He also questions whether the concept of brand equity has much validity in the voluntary sector. “It smacks rather of figuring for the sake of figuring”, he argues, “without much appreciation of where brands fit in the charity world.”
He believes that branding is much less central to charity marketing. “Very, very few charities have anything like the brand clout that major FMCG brands have,” he said. Perhaps Oxfam and Greenpeace are at that level but not many others.
This is due to a focus in charities on investing in direct response campaigns and not brand-building advertising. In addition, he argues convincingly that “people approach giving to charities in a different way from the way to buying baked beans.”
He reasons that “if Heinz beans are not available they are likely to choose an alternative to baked beans NOT an alternative brand OF baked beans. In contrast they are much more likely to want to help a cause, say children, than a particular charity and will do so through whichever brand happens to hit them with a persuasive message at the right time.”
Andrew Papworth mails his ‘Harvest’ newsletter at no charge on request to charity marketers. For many years he ran the Charity Monitor on behalf of the RNLI and syndicated its findings to several other major charities.
About Howard Lake
Howard Lake is consultant editor of UK Fundraising. He founded the site in 1994 and successfully sold it in 2022. As director of Giving X Ltd he is exploring growing giving on a massive scale.
He is the founder of Fundraising Camp and co-founder of GoodJobs.