Brand Africa 100 is the most comprehensive survey on brands in Africa, and, like in the previous versions, GeoPoll conducted data collection in all the countries involved. Kantar and Brand Leadership provided strategic analysis, rankings, and insights.

Most Admired Brands in Africa

In the main ranking, there wasn’t any change in the top six most admired brands overall in Africa. Nike, Adidas, Samsung, Coca-Cola, Apple, and Tecno maintained the same positions they occupied last year. Gucci, Toyota, Puma, and MTN closed the top 10. Non-African brands dominated the ranking with 83%.

African Brands

African brands surged to a seven-year high in the annual survey, increasing their share of the Top 100 most admired brands by 4% with 17 African brands now in the top 100 counter in 2022. MTN and Dangote continued to set the pace as the most admired African brands in both the prompted and overall mention ranking.

Overall, South African brands continued to dominate the African ranking, representing 41% of African brands (seven out of the 17). Nigeria had four brands in the top 100, and the rest is split between Ghana (Kasapreko Drinks, 31), Tanzania (Azam, 86), Uganda (Mukwano, 72), Zimbabwe (Econet, 50), Kenya (Tusker, 63) and Ethiopia (Ethiopian Airlines, 24).

Most admired financial brands

When asked about their most admired financial services brands, most of the respondents mentioned African brands (68% of the share) – eight South African, five Nigerian and two Kenyan. Africa being a global leader in mobile money, it is no surprise that telcos are now important competitors to banks with their mobile money platforms such as M-Pesa, Ecocash, Airtel, MTN and Orange Money featuring significantly in the brand mentions.

African Pride

With international brands dominating the rankings over the years, Brand Africa sought to establish brands in Africa that embody African values and culture. It is due to this that we added the question – which brand best symbolizes pride in Africa – to capture opinions on the brands that are seen to embody the African spirit and are vectors of the image and identity of the continent.

Get the Report

This is only a summary of the report. You can get the full report on the Brand Africa website to dive deeper into the rankings, methodology, and insightful commentaries from experts, as well as past reports.

The post Brand Africa 100: The Best Brands in Africa – 2022 appeared first on GeoPoll.

Watch the launches on the Brand Africa YouTube Channel.

Now in its 11th year, Brand Africa 100 is a consumer-led survey that seeks to establish brand preferences across Africa. GeoPoll facilitated Brand Africa’s data collection through mobile-based surveys conducted in 28 countries covering all economic regions in Africa, making it the most comprehensive survey on brands in Africa.

In this article, we will highlight some of the rankings. You can access the full report in African Business Magazine here.

Methodology

This research, which yielded more than 80,000 brand mentions and over 2,000 unique brands, was a collaborative effort with GeoPoll collecting the data and Kantar and Brand Leadership providing the analysis and insights.

Data was collected independently using Geopoll’s mobile survey platform, drawing a sample of more than 10,000 respondents from our own database of 250+ million respondents and other recruitment channels during the first quarter of 2021.

With the final coded data, Kantar calculated a score for each brand and created an index that took into account the sample and population sizes of each country, weighted on the gender and population of the countries covered. The brands were analyzed to ensure there were no duplications and no generic categories rather than trading brand mentions.

Most Admired Brands in Africa Overall

This year’s ranking has proven the resilience of established brands with little change at the top of our rankings, despite a tumultuous year and despite extending the survey to a larger sample of respondents. Given the coronavirus pandemic’s omnipresence, Brand Africa sought to determine its impact on the brands’ balance of power and status in the rankings. There was little change among our survey of Africa’s Most Admired Brands as US sportswear brand Nike retained its top spot. Samsung was third for the third consecutive year and Coca-Cola maintained its 4th spot.

Brands Responding to COVID-19

In 2021, due to the pandemic, a new question was added to the survey to identify the brands that Africans perceive to be the most helpful during the ongoing pandemic.

Unsurprisingly, given its global role and media presence during the pandemic, the World Health Organization (WHO) emerged top in the list of brands perceived to have been the most helpful during the pandemic. Governmental agencies, international bodies, and NGOs represented 20% of the brands named by respondents – organizations like WHO and Unicef, the Africa Centers for Disease Control, and USAID – while private sector companies represented 80%. South Africa’s MTN, which donated 7m Covid-19 vaccine doses to nine African countries, is the leading private sector brand at the second position in a private sector list where all multinational mobile operators in Africa made the list of the Top 25. Leading pharmaceutical groups, Johnson & Johnson and AstraZeneca, also made the list.

Most Admired African Brands

­­As usual, this year we asked respondents to name their most admired African brand. The resulting list shows a 28% change from last year, with several upstart local brands muscling their way into the Top 25. Dangote, MTN, DStv and other giants dominated the list again. The top newcomer, muscling in at position 10, is Bathu, a relatively new South African shoe brand that was formed less than five years ago.

Most Admired Financial Brands

The financial services sector was again dominated by African brands, particularly from South Africa (7), Nigeria (6), and Kenya (3), who made up over 75% of the Top 25 brands. The sector was marked by adaptation to the digital era, acquisitions, and support for customers during the pandemic’s tough economic conditions. GT Bank held on to the top spot for the second year in a row after another strong financial performance and restructuring to attract digital customers. The biggest change came from Kenya’s Equity Bank which moved up 6 places following expansion in East and Central Africa.

Most Admired Media Brands

The media category continues to reflect a bias towards non-African media which represent more than 75% of the most admired media in Africa. With coronavirus limiting entertainment options beyond the home, digital businesses including streaming services such as Netflix thrived. The rise of National Geographic (new entrant into the top list) and the maintenance of mainstay news brands such as BBC, CNN, and Al Jazeera, which are all accessible through South Africa’s DStv platform, propelled DStv to leapfrog BBC as the #1 media brand in Africa.

Africa’s story and perceptions continue to be shaped outside its borders because all other media brands in the top ten of the media category are non-African (apart from DSTV).

Conduct Mobile Surveys in Africa

Brand Africa has been using GeoPoll’s research platform for data collection since 2015 due to the high penetration, convenience and effectiveness of mobile across Africa. Conducting interviews via mobile ensures a wider reach and expediency in conducting research across the continent than would be possible with face-to-face interviews. To learn more about GeoPoll’s coverage and capabilities in Africa, please contact us.

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Today at the Johannesburg Stock Exchange, at an event with industry leaders from across Africa, hosted by the JSE in partnership with GeoPoll, Kantar and Brand Leadership, Brand Africa announced the Top 100 brands in Africa in their 7^th annual Brand Africa 100:  Africa’s Best Brands report. Nike, MTN, Dangote, Ecobank and BBC were recognized as the most admired brands on the continent. GeoPoll was pleased to partner with Brand Africa and Kantar on this initiative once again, facilitating the mobile-based surveys that gathered data on top brands in Africa from 25 countries throughout the continent.

Since 2011, the Brand Africa 100 has been surveying and ranking the most admired brands spontaneously recalled by African consumers. In a relatively stable Top 100 list this year, the US sports and fitness mega brand, Nike, retains the overall #1 brand in Africa spontaneously recalled by consumers. South African telecoms brand MTN is the #1 African brand spontaneously recalled brand, while surging Ethiopian brand Anbessa Shoes, at #2, swapped positions with Nigerian conglomerate, Dangote, which is the #3 most admired brand of African of origin.  

Overall, the 2018/19 Brand Africa 100 list, which is calculated from 15,000 brand mentions, illustrates a very diversified range of brands in Africa and shows year on year consistency, with 80% of the Top 100 brands having been in the Top 100 Most Admired Brands in previous years.

The highest gains are dominated by apparel and luxury brands Vans (+65), FILA (+50) and a resurgent Levi’s (+29). The sports category, led by Nike (#1), remains a strong performer, due to strategic repositioning or expansion in their positioning towards lifestyle high profile endorsements, and partnerships which have freshened and broadened the brands’ appeal, particularly to youthful and young consumers.  The biggest faller was Peak Milk, dropping from 33 to 98, possibly due to the dairy industry globally seeing a significant drop in sales of cows’ milk as alternatives are becoming more and more popular amongst consumers. Victoria’s Secret and Indomie dropped 36 and 33 spots respectively.

Because of the transformational and catalytic impact of media and financial services in Africa, Brand Africa has separate questions on the Most Admired Financial Services Brands and Most Admired Media Brands.

Top Media Brands in Africa

In the media sub-survey, DStv (incorporating GoTV, Multichoice and Supersport) has welcomed its brother the SABC onto the Top 10 media list. The media list is led by BBC, which has an extensive history and coverage of Africa through its BBC Worldservice radio and specific African programming. The media list is dominated by Europe (40%), North America (20%) and Asia (20%).  A deeper analysis of the media category shows high levels of fragmentation, with many local and regional players – thus in general only global players with extensive African reach and resources dominate the top of the list.

Top Financial Services Brands in Africa

In the Most Admired Financial Services Brands category, Ecobank has ascended to the #1 position as the Most Admired Financial Services Brand, and Safaricom Mpesa retains its pole position among mobile money brands. 60% of the are made in Africa. The presence of multiple mobile money brands on the list, including Safaricom Mpesa (#13), Orange Money (#18), MTN Mobile Money  (#19) and Tigo (#23),  underscores the impact of not only Mpesa as the catalyst, but mobile as a key enabler for financial access.   The Top 25 Most Admired Financial Services Brands list is dominated by South Africa (6), Nigeria (5) and Kenya (2).

About Brand Africa

Brand Africa 100 was developed by pan-African branding and reputation advisory firm, Brand Leadership Group supported by GeoPoll, the leader in mobile-based market research throughout Africa, and strategic analysis and insights by Kantar TNS, the world’s leading data, insights and consulting company.

GeoPoll used their sophisticated mobile survey platform to identify the most admired brands in Africa among a representative sample of African consumers in 25 African countries.

“The scope of the Brand Africa study across such a diverse sample and geographic spread would be impossible to achieve using traditional research methodologies,” says Nicholas Becker, GeoPoll CEO. “Using GeoPoll’s mobile-based research platform and large panel of respondents, we were able to quickly gather more than 15,000 brand mentions from 25 countries in Africa, providing brands with valuable data that will inform their growth. GeoPoll was pleased to partner with Brand Africa once again to gather this vital research across Africa.”

The Brand Africa 100 results will be published in African Business Magazine on sale globally from 25 May 2019 and available online to subscribers on www.africanbusinessmag.com and www.brandafrica.com. For more information about this study or to request a copy of the full results please contact GeoPoll here.

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Advertisers are quickly turning to Africa to promote their brands, and Africa’s total share of ad spend is expected to grow significantly over the next decade. But very little is known about these markets: in the past, market research firms have not focused on emerging nations, which means that many companies and large brands are targeting audiences they know very little about. Information on preferred brands, buying habits, and target demographics has been largely based on guesswork, as until now there has been no reliable way to reach consumers.

The mobile phone is changing all of that, and at GeoPoll we have been running surveys to determine the most popular brands of soft drinks, water, coffee, and more.  As shown below, we asked about purchasing habits in Kenya for several drink categories, first asking users if they had bought a type of drink the day before, and then asking what brand they bought. 

 The results give us a real-time look into the popularity of brands across Kenya: perhaps unsurprisingly Fanta, Coca-Cola, and Sprite are the most popular soft drinks, and there is a noticeable gap between those three and other brands, including Pepsi. Over 15% of respondents, and on many days over 20%, reported buying Fanta, Coca-Cola, or Sprite the day before, but less than 5% reported buying Pepsi the past day.  

Dasani has a clear lead on the bottled water market in Kenya, and even when less consumers reported purchasing Dasani water the previous day, it is still ahead of all other brands. Coffee is another product where a clear market leader emerges, in this case Nescafe.  Ketepa tea, which is a local Kenyan tea brand, is the most popular tea drink.

These datasets demonstrate the power of the mobile phone in delivering reliable data on shopping habits, and other GeoPoll survey methodologies can also track brand perception over time.  This enables brands to effectively target audiences before they run ad campaigns, determine how many people have seen past advertisements, and track what type of consumer is actually buying their product, which will help them break into these increasingly important markets. 

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