Revealed: Top 20 Ads and Brands Resonating Across Diverse America

Lysol, Netflix, Google, and Band-Aid rank among the most Culturally Fluent brands in our analysis of more than 500 brands and 200 ads across the last 18 months.

Collage Group is pleased to unveil our rankings of the more than 500 brands and 200 ads evaluated as part of our extensive CultureRate:Brand and CultureRate:Ad database. Lysol, Netflix, Google, and Band-Aid rank among the most Culturally Fluent brands, while Dove, National Geographic, Oreo and Campbell’s produced the most Culturally Fluent ad creative.

The research includes more than 20 industries across 100 subcategories, and is organized into 10 broad sectors, including: Alcoholic Beverages, Automotive, Education, Financial Services & Banking, Food & Beverages, Health & Wellness, Household Products, Media & Telecom, Personal Products, and Retail & QSR.

The rankings follow the release of new U.S. Census data that shows America is much more racially and ethnically diverse than ever. For example, the multiracial population (individuals reporting more than one race) jumped 276% over the past decade—from 9 million in 2010 to 33.8 million in 2020.

“Consumers are expecting more of brands as cultural transformation of the American consumer accelerates,” says David Wellisch, Collage Group Co-Founder and CEO. “Given the rapidly changing demographic landscape, a deep understanding of cultural resonance and its drivers is an essential capacity to create a winning brand strategy in diverse America.”

Collage Group’s proprietary measurement and benchmarketing tool, CultureRate, offers brands a superior way to measure brand and ad Cultural Fluency–the organizational ability to use culture to efficiently and effectively connect across consumer segments.

CultureRate research centers on a key metric referred to as the Cultural Fluency Quotient (CFQ). CFQ scores are designed specifically to measure cultural resonance across segments for both brands (B-CFQ) and ads (A-CFQ). Researchers developed the measurement by testing 20 distinct components scores in multiple combinations to accurately measure cultural resonance while providing predictive insight into higher purchase intent and brand favorability. CFQ scores provide marketing and insights professionals with a tool to gauge their brand or ad cultural fluency and evaluate the competitive landscape.

Top Ten Brands for Cultural Fluency* include:

1. Lysol

2. Netflix

3. YouTube

3. M&M’s

3. Clorox

4. Band-Aid

4. Dawn

5. Google

6. Amazon

7. Hershey’s

Top 15 Ads for Cultural Fluency* include:

1. Dove: All Hair is Beautiful

2. Oreo: Stay Home, Stay Playful

2. National Geographic: Reimaging Dinosaurs

2. Dove: Skin Stories

2. Lysol: Questions Need Answers

3. Frito-Lay: Let’s Summer

3. Campbell’s: Snowbuddy

3. Disney: Magic is Here

4. Tropicana: Breakfast Across America

4. Dunkin’: Welcome to Dunkin’

4. Clorox: Caregivers – Bodega

4. Subaru: Crosstrek Girl Trip

4. Coca-Cola: History Shakers

4. McCormick: Taco Night

4. Cascade: Do It Every Night With Cascade Platinum

*Only brands with an average awareness of over 60 respondents per segment are included to avoid low sample issues. Several brands and ads tied for the top rankings. Collage Group’s CultureRate Explorer tool includes all rankings.

CFQ reports ranking the top brands and ads are now available for each major industry in Collage Group’s CultureRate Explorer tool, with deep dive reports available exclusively for subscribers of Collage Group’s cultural intelligence platforms. Each deep dive report includes overall category CFQ rankings by consumer segment and acculturation levels, as well as Cultural Reach scores that show how many segments with whom an ad or brand is resonant. Where a robust sample is available, sub-category rankings are also included.

“These reports are just one of the many ways Collage Group supports its members,” says David Evans, Collage Group Chief Insights Officer. “When coupled with Cultural Traits, Passion Points and the combined 78 million insights in our cultural intelligence platform, more than 200 of America’s leading brands are leveraging CultureRate to effectively and efficiently leapfrog competitors to engage and win America’s diverse consumers.”

Harness the power of cultural intelligence to win diverse America. Contact us to discover how you can turn insights into impact today!

Read on to find out which brands consumers identify as sharing their values – and the practices they used to get there.

In a time where people are exposed to more advertising and have more options than ever before, it’s critical for brands to create authentic connections to keep consumers coming back. One way to do this is to demonstrate you care about the things your consumers care about. After all, we know that many consumers across racial and ethnic segments will reward brands that share their values and punish those that defy them.

Collage Group’s brand rating tool, CultureRate:Brand, provides insight on how well brands are signaling shared values with consumers.

The tool, which is designed to assess cultural fluency (i.e., number of segments the brand resonates with), measures shared values by asking brand-aware consumers to agree or disagree with the statement “This brand cares about the things that are important to me.” Here we see the top ten brands among more than 400 in our database that consumers aged 18-39 most often identify as sharing their values.

But we know that America is diverse and different segments have different values that line up with different brands.

So we took a deeper look at the data to understand which brands are connecting on shared values across racial and ethnic segments and which are connecting on shared values with specific segments. The top 10 lists for each racial and ethnic group are below.

First thing to note, both Lysol and Clorox rank highly across segments.

In the era of COVID-19, when consumers are placing higher value on cleanliness and staying healthy than ever before, it’s not surprising to see these brands pop. Lysol and Clorox have proven they value cleanliness and health by having select products approved by the EPA to successfully kill the COVID-19 virus. And they’ve continued to show their commitment to health and safety by making generous donations to various organizations (CDC, NEA and the American Red Cross) fighting against COVID-19 and helping to get the country back up and running.

Second thing to consider, outside of a handful of brands appearing across lists, we also see significant variation by segment.

For example, the top 10 list for shared values for the Black segment includes Chick-Fil-A, Nike, and Fenty. Nike’s a no-brainer given their extensive and very public support for racial equality. And Chick-Fil-A’s high ranking is probably tied to its association with Christianity and Christian values—something the highly religious Black segment likely resonates with.

Fenty Beauty, a brand founded by music superstar Rihanna in 2017, is a relative newcomer that’s been able to connect with Black consumers through its commitment to diversity and inclusion. Fenty has gone that extra step and baked these values into the products it sells. For example, it offers 50 shades of foundation, a substantial improvement over many other brands that treat dark skin as a monolith. The brand also features models of varying genders in their advertising. And it donates 100% of proceeds from select products to the Clara Lionel Foundation, which provides extensive support to marginalized communities around the world.

Our findings illustrate that both rising and established brands can successfully communicate to consumers that they share their values. And you can too.

In addition to shared values, our proprietary B-CFQ (Brand Cultural Fluency Quotient) metric also measures Brand Fit, Brand Relevance, Brand Trust, Brand Advocacy, and Brand Memories. Fill out the form below to learn more about our category-specific CultureRate:Brand studies and how you can use them to increase your brand’s cultural fluency.

Recent Posts

Get In Touch

Harness the power of cultural intelligence to win diverse America. Discover how you can turn insights into impact today!

In this CultureRate:Ad study, we had the opportunity to test a recent ad by Lysol, “Questions Need Answers,” released in July 2020.

Amidst these uncertain times, Lysol’s ad aims to answer people’s common questions about how and where they can use Lysol disinfecting products.

The ad creatively displays the questions as if someone typed them into an internet search engine and shows people all the unlikely places they can use Lysol – including game controllers, packages, couches, and laptops. And it was a hit! This was one of the highest-performing home care ads of the set, resonating with all four consumer segments – Hispanic, Black, Asian, and White – with an A-CFQ score of 75 or higher for each group. And this ad ranked within the top two for each segment.

The top performing features of this ad were the message and visuals. And a whopping 80% of consumers agreed that this ad has an important message – higher than any other home care ad tested. This ad does a great job of capturing people’s attention in a relatable way – typing questions into a search bar – even ones that may seem a little outlandish! And viewers seem to like the format of learning about the product this way.

Lysol’s ad clearly and effectively communicated the value of their products, mitigating viewer confusion. The ad’s confident tone resulted in high rates of positive emotions across segments, like happiness, excitement, and pride.

For membership inquiries, demos, or questions, please fill out the contact form below.

Get In Touch

Harness the power of cultural intelligence to win diverse America. Discover how you can turn insights into impact today!

Collage Group just launched new syndicated research streams ranking ads and brands on cultural fluency. Download the content and watch the webinar on alcoholic beverage brands for key insights.u0026nbsp;

CultureRate:Ad and CultureRate:Brand are major new initiatives that provide a solution to our members’ mounting need for a comprehensive, ongoing analysis of the cultural fluency of branding and advertising.

This is especially for the “New Wave” of younger Americans who regardless of race or ethnicity are highly responsive to multicultural themes, representation and stories.

CultureRate:Ad and CultureRate:Brand are part of a larger initiative to place every member’s brands and ads at the center of what we do. In the last two weeks, we begin our 2020 CultureRate:Brand initiative with the release of rankings in alcoholic beverages.

Our rating system is built on two years of research into how best to measure cultural fluency. Our 2020 initiative is the first step toward realizing a vision of a comprehensive and transparent database that reveals what works and what doesn’t. CultureRate:Ad is based on over 120,000 responses to approximately 150 ads in 8 categories, with deep multicultural, Millennial and Gen Z oversample. We piloted CultureRate:Brand with four investigations testing over 100 brands with 6000 consumer responses.

For each investigation we are testing ads and brands with approximately 450-500 consumers between 18-39 (21-39 for alcoholic beverages) equally divided across three levels of Hispanic acculturation, Black, Asian and White. Except for personal care and beauty categories, the sample is equally divided across gender. We also capture respondents’ cultural attribute profile and other demographics factors. This can enabled detailed assessment and lookalike identification of high frequency, high affinity or culturally similar consumers.

We hope that access to this database will motivate more inclusive advertising to drive up Cultural Fluency across every category. It’s time to raise the bar for everyone.