Gartner Reveals the Marketing Strategies That Drive 2023-2024 Genius Brands

Gartner’s Digital IQ Index Reveals Genius Brands Prioritize Brand Governance, Capitalize on Key Customer Journey Moments and Hire Tech-Savvy Talent to Drive Innovation

Gartner, Inc. has released its list of 2023-2024 Genius Brands within the annual Gartner Digital IQ Index, identifying the best-in-class brands across 12 industries.

The Digital IQ Index is a Gartner proprietary research tool that allows you to benchmark your brand’s digital performance against industry competitors to prioritize investments and maintain relevance across channels.

Each year, Gartner uses the Digital IQ Index to measure brands’ digital marketing performance, aptitude and maturity relative to peers. The Index tells who is “Genius” and what defines digital marketing excellence for brands today.

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The Gartner Digital IQ Index is an annual ranking of brands within a given industry based on digital investments and performance. For each brand, Gartner measures hundreds of data points across four digital dimensions – website, 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”.

Thirty-six of the 1,176 brands analyzed were categorized as “Genius” this year (see Table 1). On average, Genius brands achieved 16.5 times more site traffic than their peers in 2023.

“As digital marketing best practices constantly evolve, it’s difficult for CMOs to define their brands’ path to success,” said Matt Moorut, Director Analyst in the Gartner Marketing Practice. “By understanding how the world’s top-performing digital marketing brands differentiate themselves, marketing leaders can refine their own strategies and deliver programs that drive results.”

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

Building talent strategies that focus on leveraging technical expertise to drive innovation. Nearly 19% of Genius brands’ job posts for marketing roles contain data science or machine learning keywords, compared to just 3% of their peers’ job postings.

A focus on curating strong brand identities by instilling brand governance across channels. On average, Genius brands have 6.4x more followers and garner 119% higher engagement rates on Instagram than non-Genius brands.

Prioritizing the most-critical moments in customer journeys when investing in interactive tools that impact customer experiences. Seventy percent of Genius brands offer a guided selling tool (e.g. pricing tool, product finder) compared to 36% of non-Genius brands.

Table 1. The 2023-2024 Genius Brands

Three best practices among Genius brands

Every year Gartner benchmarks thousands of brands’ digital marketing performance against peers using the Digital IQ Index. The top 3% are Genius brands. Here’s what sets them apart.

Invest in people : Invest in people and process, not just technology
Govern brand : Build clear brand frameworks and guide implementation
Prioritize touchpoints : Drive action at key moments in the customer journey