Which brands are most associated with the value of “patriotism”? A new survey from Brand Keys asked 4,500 consumers from 9 US census regions to evaluate 197 brands across 35 category-specific emotional engagement values, with one of those values being how much patriotism they emotionally credited to the brand. The winner? Jeep, meeting almost all of consumers’ emotional engagement expectations regarding patriotism.
The study looked at how close brands were to the consumer ideal in the patriotism value, assigning each a percentage score relative to a category benchmark. As such, Jeep’s leading score of 98% means that it almost fully meets consumers’ emotional ideal for patriotism in the auto category. Close behind and in a tie for second were Hershey’s and Coca-Cola (97% of the way to meeting their respective benchmarks), with Levi Strauss and Disney rounding out the top 5 (each at 95%).
The researchers note that all of the armed services brands (such as the Air Force and Army) were high on the list when it came to emotional association with patriotism, but were excluded from the list as the study specifically looked at for-profit businesses.
Positions 6 through 10 were held by Colgate (94%), Zippo (93%), Wrigley’s (92%), Ralph Lauren (91%) and a tie between Kodak and Gillette (90%). Some other notable brands in the top 25 included Harley-Davidson (#12), Budweiser (#14), Ford (#16), GE (#19) and John Deere (#20).
Sports teams such as the Yankees, Patriots, and Cowboys also scored highly, but did not crack the top 25.
