Greggs, Lucky Saint, Marks & Spencer, McDonald’s and Octopus Energy have been shortlisted for the Marketing Week Awards Brand of the Year for 2024.

These five brands were chosen from a long list put together by the Marketing Week editorial team, which was then ranked by the Marketing Week Awards jury of 6o plus senior marketing leaders.

Brands were rated based on business performance, brand strategy excellence, innovation and use of the 4Ps over the past 12-18 months.

The winner will be chosen based on a combination of a public vote, and the scores of our judges.

Russell Parsons, editor-in-chief of Marketing Week and the Festival of Marketing, says: “Marketing Week is nothing without brands. Brand of the Year is all about excellence and our shortlist has that in abundance. Congratulations to all those shortlisted, they all deserve their place on the list.”

The winner will be revealed at an awards ceremony at The Londoner in Central London on 7 November. Last year’s winner was Guinness and previous winners have included Aldi and Tesco.

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The shortlist for Brand of the Year 2024

Greggs

“We are building our brand by making Greggs mean more to more people,” declared its chief executive Roisin Currie in March.

The food-on-the-go brand had just reported a sales increase of 20% in 2023, which in turn, helped it register a 13% increase in profit and led to its highest-ever market share.

“Our success demonstrates that the growth drivers we are pursuing are the right ones,” added Currie at the time.

Greggs has increased physical availability, through a presence on more channels via initiatives like click-and-collect, while keeping stores open for longer.

But it is also attracting new customers through innovation, investing in making products to serve more occasions. It claimed to have overtaken McDonald’s last year to become the UK’s leading food-on-the-go breakfast retailer. It has also enhanced mental availability. It has invested heavily in marketing to drive consideration and purchase intent.

And this appears to be paying off.

Its consideration score on YouGov’s BrandIndex increased from 36.9 in 2022 to 39 in 2023, which outstrips its category rivals. Its purchase intent score also improved by a margin deemed statistically significant in 2023 versus 2022.

It’s not just about recruiting new customers; it has also had success in retaining existing ones and getting them to spend more. Use of its loyalty app doubled during 2023, while it claimed those who use the app shop more often.

Greggs is a brand with a strong proposition, offering a range of products people like. It is using this as a springboard for further growth, remaining on track to achieve its stated aim of doubling sales by 2026.

There are several paths to growth and its increase in physical availability, differentiation and attracting new users, for example are three areas where Greggs is becoming a best practice case study.

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Lucky Saint

It’s more than luck that has got non-alcoholic beer brand Lucky Saint to the success it sees today. The brand has deployed marketing fundamentals to great effect, allowing it to build its brand and contribute to category growth.

Lucky Saint’s internal mantra is “fresh consistency”, something that it has showcased in its campaigns where it has worked to build distinctiveness through a disciplined approach to advertising. Marketing and ecommerce director Kerttu Inkeroinen says the brand has been careful to build on its advertising, rather than pursuing something new each time.

“You should show up again and again, and build on those memory structures,” Inkeroinen told Marketing Week in May.

While non-alcoholic beers were once seen as a niche product, Lucky Saint has been helping push the category into the mainstream. The brand was the third biggest contributor to year-over-year category growth in the 12 weeks to 23 March, according to Circana.

As the category moves more into the mainstream, Lucky Saint has been proving that non-alcoholic beer is not a category reserved for January. In 2023 more alcohol-free beers were consumed in the summer than in January, marking a first for both the category and the brand itself.

This summer, Lucky Saint launched its first-ever campaign outside of January, focusing on refreshment.

In another first for the brand, at the end of 2023 Lucky Saint launched its first NPD. It added a new Hazy IPA product alongside its original lager. As of May, Hazy IPA was the number three brand in low and no IPA-style beers, according to Circana, with the product gaining on second place. The new product is also working to recruit new drinkers to Lucky Saint, it says.

Lots of the big brewers now have non-alcoholic offerings, but Lucky Saint has always been a brand that sells non-alcoholic beer exclusively. It is the biggest dedicated brand in the category, with its focus and discipline paying off to mean it can go toe-to-toe with the brewing giants.

Despite the impressive growth it has seen already, Lucky Saint’s ambitions don’t stop there. The brand wants to get to the stage where it is synonymous with the alcohol-free category, in the way that Guinness is with stout.

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Marks & Spencer

After a difficult decade where the business risked irrecoverable decline, Marks & Spencer is firmly on the up.

Two years into its Reshape for Growth strategy, the retail giant served 1 million more customers in the year ending 30 March 2024, attracting shoppers from all socio-economic and age demographics.

Clothing and home sales rose 5.2% to £402.8m over the 12-month period, while buoyant food sales increased 13% to £395.3m. Both businesses have now delivered 12 consecutive quarters of sales growth.

Not only were sales up, pre-tax profit rose 58% year-on-year to £716.4m, driven by a commitment to full price. According to chief executive Stuart Machin, the financial health of the business is as strong as it has been in decades.

During the past 12 months, 80% of Marks & Spencer’s sales were full price, which the business claims has fuelled value perceptions. The retailer invested £60m in food prices and kept prices “almost flat” in clothing and home, the plan being to ensure promotions are “very limited” over the coming year.

Despite boasting more than 17 million members since its relaunch in 2020, M&S has no intention to offer discounts via its Sparks rewards scheme, with Machin claiming the retailer prefers to offer the “best price” every day.

M&S credits an investment in style and quality for driving volume and value clothing and home growth. This focus on improving its design credentials is paying off, especially within the lingerie division, which delivered a “record-breaking” 38% share in the year to 30 March. Almost a third (30%) of the retailer’s lingerie customers are now under 30 – double the number from last year.

Ecommerce sales rose 7.8% over the period, with improvements to the effectiveness of online marketing credited with driving womenswear sales, in particular. The M&S app continued to grow, accounting for 44% of online orders. The retailer also saw its online partner brand sales rise 33%, as new tie-ups with the likes of Adidas, Puma and Sweaty Betty helped to grow the average basket value.

Investments have also been made from a cultural perspective. Claiming a “high-performance culture” is critical to reshaping M&S for growth, the business invested £89m in frontline staff salaries, introduced monthly pulse surveys and now expects every support centre employee to spend seven days annually working in store as part of their performance objectives.

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McDonald’s

McDonald’s is a golden example of what can happen when marketing is truly appreciated as a driver of growth in the business.

As one of the biggest and best-known brands globally, you might be forgiven for thinking the role of marketing in driving growth at the fast-food business was always obvious. This was not necessarily the case.

Speaking at the 2024 Cannes Lions Festival, chief financial officer Ian Borden said that, until a few years ago, marketing was viewed as something of a “black box” in the organisation. Thanks to the work of CMO Morgan Flatley and her team who have worked hard to align marketing with finance and the rest of the organisation, the whole business now appreciates how the function shows up to drive growth.

That growth, of which marketing has been a key lever, has been consistently impressive. In 2023, it grew its global comparable sales by 9%, and in its most recent quarter, sales were up nearly 2% versus the same period in the year prior, even as it faces tough comparisons from inflation-driven pricing in 2023. As of its most recent quarter (ended 31 March), McDonald’s has now been growing its comparable sales for 13 consecutive quarters.

This consistent growth has been underpinned by a globally aligned advertising agenda, as well as ambitious strides made on McDonald’s digital proposition, in particular its loyalty scheme.

‘Raise Your Arches’ was a platform first launched by McDonald’s in January 2023. The ad featured no food or restaurants but used the business’s distinctive brand codes cleverly throughout. Leaning on the power of a consistent creative platform, McDonald’s launched a follow-up in August 2023, and another festive-themed iteration later that year.

The core idea has been adapted for different markets, with McDonald’s adopting what it terms a “globally consistent but locally relevant” approach to its marketing, meaning it can push out successful ideas internationally.

Another focus for the company has been its digital engagement, particularly through its loyalty scheme. The company made nearly $25bn (£20bn) worth of sales from loyalty scheme members in the 12 months to 31 March. As well as enabling McDonald’s to form closer relationships with its consumers, the loyalty scheme also provides it with data to enable smarter pricing and tailored offers, CEO Chris Kempczinski said in February this year.

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Octopus Energy

Pleasing customers in a sector like utilities is no mean feat. Even less so in energy, where prices have been rocketing and trust is low.

But one brand that has weathered the storm and remained largely on the right side of consumers is Octopus Energy.

In nine years the brand has gone from relative obscurity to the UK’s biggest electricity supplier and second-largest gas provider, reporting its first full-year profit for its 2023 financial year. The group reported a net profit of £203m and a 1.6% profit margin for the year, while group revenues tripled from £4bn to £13bn.

One of the things fuelling this growth is the fact customer is at its heart. The brand’s global director of product and marketing, Rebecca Dibb-Simkin, has explained previously that the business was “deliberately built… without walls between functions” meaning every department is responsible for ensuring customer experience is of utmost importance.

“Everything the customer touches is your product and a critical element of your business and driving growth,” she said.

Having customers at its heart means the business is committed to sacrificing profits to keep customer bills low, with Octopus Energy claiming to have absorbed £69m of rising energy costs last year, as well as tripling its Octo Assist hardship fund and sending more than 50,000 blankets to the most in need households.

The steps it is taking to support customers are working. Octopus Energy has achieved Which? Recommended Provider status for seven years in a row, and one of only three to do this in 2024.

It is also by far the strongest brand in the sector, according to YouGov’s BrandIndex. The energy provider has an index score – an overall indication of brand health – of 23.1. It tops the category and comes well ahead of competitors including Ovo Energy (3.4), M&S Energy (2.3), Ecotricity (1.9) and Smart Energy (1.5) which make up the top five. It is also the best-performing brand across the entire utilities category.

And it has done all this with a lean marketing team of just 20 people. “I maintain a ruthless control over efficiency in both my team and my budget,” Dibb-Simkin told Marketing Week earlier this year.

Keeping customers at its heart while it grows is key, especially as it acquires other energy firms. Octopus took over Shell Energy last year, plus it is set to pay back the £3bn in state support it received to take on collapsed energy supplier Bulb in 2021, meaning the bailout will end up costing the UK public next to nothing, which will also help boost consumer perceptions of the brand. Not easy in a notoriously unliked and unloved category.

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