Who do you think should be named Brand of the Year 2011?

Who has your vote for brand of the year 2011? The Marketing Society has come up with a shortlist of 20 brands that you and your students can vote for using this link:

There is a useful summary of each brand’s activities in 2011 on that website - a good starting point for research and for discussion about the criteria that we might use in making a decision.

One possible approach in a lesson is to ask the students to come up with their nominations for Brand of Year 2011 before showing them the Marketing Society list. Which of their nominations are reflected in the “official list”? It might highlight how judgemental any awards process like this is.

There are some interesting choices in the shortlisted 20. Yeo Valley is clearly there as a result of its prominence on X-Factor and subsequent viral promotional popularity. Help for Heroes is another interesting and, I think, worthy choice.

But what of British Airways, Innocent, IBM & Barclaycard? What have they done to deserve their nominations?