MBLM Reveals Olay and Dove Lead the Way of Health and Hygiene Brands for Brand Intimacy

MBLM, the Brand Intimacy Agency focused on strategy, design, creative and technology, today revealed that the health and hygiene industry ranked ninth out of 15 industries, following apparel and fast food, in its Brand Intimacy 2017 Report. The report, which is the largest study of brands based on emotions, found that within the category Olay placed first followed by Dove and then Crest. Brand Intimacy is defined as a new paradigm that leverages and strengthens the emotional bonds between a person and a brand. According to the 2017 report, top ranked intimate brands continued to outperform the S&P and Fortune 500 indices in both revenue and profit over the past 10 years.

The remaining brands in the top 10 for the health and hygiene industry are: Colgate, Listerine, Ivory, Pantene, Gillette, Schick, and Nivea.

“The health and hygiene category is complex and multifaceted,” stated Mario Natarelli, partner at MBLM. “The industry itself creates intimate products we use in or on our body, yet it doesn’t translate into intimate brand relationships. Clearly, there is an underleveraged opportunity.”

Both of the top brands in this category, Olay and Dove, are ranked in the Top 30 of the Brand Intimacy Study overall. Even though these two industry leaders are both widely popular and sell many of the same types of products, they approach Brand Intimacy from very different perspectives. Both brands speak to the quality and efficacy of their products, but they differ on what the purpose of those products are. Olay is dedicated to creating “Ageless Beauty”, while Dove promotes “Real Beauty”. Both messages happen to be on opposite spectrums.

Other U.S. health and hygiene industry findings from MBLM’s 2017 report include:

• Olay’s strongest archetype is indulgence, which describes a relationship centered on moments of pampering and gratification, and is the type of association one would expect with a beauty brand rather than a personal care brand
• Compared to both Olay and Dove, the rest of the health and hygiene industry has very weak associations to indulgence, which suggests that these brands bring an element of gratification and excitement to the category that other brands don’t
• Millennials strongly prefer Dove, and older consumers tend to choose Olay
• Older generations seem to value the more “traditional” ideals of beauty that are associated with Olay, while millennials are more likely to choose a brand with a more body-positive, empowering message like Dove’s

This year’s report contains the most comprehensive rankings of brands based on emotion, analyzing the responses of 6,000 consumers and 54,000 brand evaluations across 15 industries in the U.S., Mexico and UAE. MBLM’s reports and interactive Brand Ranking Tool showcase the performance of almost 400 brands, revealing the characteristics and intensity of the consumer bonds.

To download the full Brand Intimacy 2017 Report or explore the Ranking Tool please visit: http://mblm.com/lab/brandintimacy-study/.

Natarelli and Rina Plapler, partner at MBLM, will be releasing their first book: Brand Intimacy, A New Paradigm in Marketing.