Methodology

Brands is the result of a rigorous and comprehensive evaluation of today’s emerging brands. The final list represents the 30 brands that best exemplify our tenets of brand growth: understanding human truths, creating exceptional brand experiences, and delivering superior business results. Our selection process involved analyzing 200+ brands within this conceptual framework. Candidates had to have a significant U.S. presence and were nominated based on their perceived disruption of cultural or category norms, ability to draw media attention, and economic growth. Inputs to the analytical model included: brand audits conducted by our own Interbrand analysts, social media listening data gathered in partnership with Infegy and investment data gathered with PitchBook.

To create a “brand experience” metric, qualitative brand experience audits were conducted by 25+ cross-discipline senior Interbrand staff, determining the brands’ abilities to answer unmet consumer needs in their categories. (Additionally, brands were evaluated on their perceived potential to adapt and emerge from the COVID-19 crisis successfully.)

For the “human truths” metric, we partnered with the Infegy team, looking at a combination of key performance indicators like total social media post volume, post volume growth in the past year, and Infegy’s “trust” and “love” measures, derived using emotional analysis.

A quantitative “business results” metric was formed using PitchBook’s brand valuation and funding data. Contending brands were assessed equally along these three dimensions and their level of adherence to these dimensions were noted via the heat mapped concentric circles at the top of each brand commentary; results were synthesized to identify the 30 top-performing brands from the pool.

By combining expert qualitative evaluations with quantitative performance measurements, our evaluation framework aims to provide a comprehensive picture of brand potential.

Download the Breakthrough Brands 2020 report here.