Top Performing Brands Prioritize First-Party Data Acquisition and Advertising Agility

Gartner, Inc. released the list of Genius Brands within the latest Gartner Digital IQ Index, identifying the best-in-class brands across 15 industries. Forty-five of the 1,402 brands analyzed were categorized as “Genius” this year (see Table 1).

On average, Genius Brands achieved 10.9x more site traffic than their peers in 2022 and grew their revenue by 8.6% in 2021 relative to 2020.

For each brand, Gartner measures hundreds of data points across four key marketing dimensions – site, digital marketing channels, social media and path to purchase – in a quest to quantify a brand’s digital aptitude and digital maturity relative to its industry peers. The best-in-class brands in each industry are categorized as “Genius Brands.”

“Understanding what Genius Brands collectively do better than their peers can help CMOs develop roadmaps and leverage best-practices to improve their own brands’ digital maturity,” said Matt Moorut, Director Analyst in the Gartner Marketing practice. 

There are three key differences that set Genius Brands apart from their peers:

1. Greater agility in adjusting media and content strategies with evolving customer sentiment and behavior. Genius Brands served 6.6x more desktop display ad impressions than peers in 2022 and achieved 9.0x more desktop display traffic.
2. Higher prioritization of and transparency with first-party data acquisition, providing greater transparency and clarity on how data will be handled to help customers with key tasks. Genius Brands are 2.2x more likely to use interactive tools enabling data acquisition on their mobile sites.
3. A more-evident focus on customer journey orchestration, delivering site experiences that garner greater engagement by curating journeys that map to their audience needs. On average, Genius Brand websites achieved a lower bounce rate, deeper site journeys and higher numbers of return visitors on both mobile and desktop devices in 2022.

Table 1. The 2022-2023 Gartner Genius Brands

Source: Gartner (March 2023)