Let’s not pretend to be surprised that “60% of all content created by brands is poor, irrelevant or fails to deliver.” Havas Group’s Meaningful Brands study has just provided the data to formalise something you knew by observation anyway.

The largest global study of its kind, spanning 33 countries, 300,000 people and 1500 brands, has determined that while 84% of people expect brands to produce content, 60% of the content created by brands is nothing more than clutter.

Only 40% of the world’s leading 1,500 brands produce content that meets consumer requirements. Moreover globally, brand trust is very weak at an average of 57%. Australians’ trust of brands is the lowest worldwide, with an average of just 25%.

The study is carried out each year to link brand performance to our quality of life (for example, health, happiness, financial, relationships and community) and wellbeing. This year, its new data tracks the relationship between a brand’s performance, its meaningfulness and the content it produces.

75% of people in the study expect brands to make a contribution to our wellbeing and quality of life. Just 40% believe brands are doing so.

Do brands need to? Yes. The Meaningful Brands analysis demonstrates that the more personally meaningful a brand becomes the better business results it will achieve. Brands that are considered meaningful outperformed the stock market by 206%, up from 133% from the 2015 study. Meaningful Brands also gained a 48% increase in consumers’ share of wallet and up to 137% greater returns on KPIs for marketing activity.

Yannick Bolloré, chairman and chief executive officer of Havas Group, commented, “We live in a world of content overload. A world where every day 500 million tweets, 4.3 billion Facebook messages and 500 million hours of YouTube footage are sent, posted and uploaded. In this world, only brands that form more meaningful connections with people will prosper. It’s no longer enough to produce products that work. Brands need to know why people care, and what makes their brands meaningful.”

The top 12 global Meaningful Brands are:

“I really think that if you look at all these tech brands, they are at the top of the ranking, why, because they make my life easier, basically and they are quite free. All these apps are nearly free to download, providing great services,” noted Havas Media Group global managing director, Dominique Delport.

In Australia,  Google is the #1 Meaningful Brand, PayPal #2, ABC #3, Coles #4 and Qantas #5.

Bolloré added, “These results give us the same kind of wake-up call we delivered back in 2008 when we launched Meaningful Brands and demonstrated that most people wouldn’t care if 74% of brands disappeared. For 2017, we see two new statistical facts: the critical role of content in creating brands that are meaningful to people and the underperformance in this area.

“The data is clear, brands must rapidly become better at seizing the opportunities that good content can offer – or they – and the advertising community that supports them – will struggle to survive.”