From Brand Rank Page Toward a Brand Dashboard in 2023

In 2020, we introduced the Brand Rank Page and sketched the aspiration to develop it gradually into a Brand Dashboard during 2021, 2022 and further. We did a series of updates to show brand rank trends for around 30,000 brands monitored in Icecat. Thus, we included a break-down per country to visualize a brand’s global footprint, we added Data Health based on completeness score, average review scores per brand based on Testseek’s metadata on tens of thousands of expert reviews, and the top X products per brand. Furthermore, we added a brand stats search and overview page. Recently, we added a function to compare your brand with competitors on performance.

Do we stop here? Of course not!

Icecat Research Journal

Our research indicates that the Global Brand Rank is a meaningful variable. Brand Rank is well-explained by a manufacturing brand’s content marketing strategy. Especially, impactful are the adoption of an open content syndication policy, the number of connected e-commerce platforms in a brand’s ecosystem, and the size, depth and width of a manufacturers online portfolio. Data Health, based on the completeness scores of product datasheets, correlates well to the average review score, which in turn correlates to brand rank.

Expanding the Rank Page

In the coming months and 2023, we plan to further expand the Brand Rank Page first with metadata to show:

• Sustainability estimates based on scores per product, i.e., the percentage of products that have at least one sustainability logo awarded to it.
• A category page with basically the same data elements as the brand page, including a top 10 of brands for the respective category.
• A country page with basically the same data elements as the brand (and category) page, though limited to the respective country.
• The number of products per category (# total brand products/# brand categories) as an estimate of the brand’s portfolio depth, average sales price of the brand’s stocked products, total stock, and Capital estimate (stock*average price) through time.
• An Open Data option users to download in CSV the dataset for the brand search page, but also brand and other pages individually.
• Adding to the (brand page) download statistics split out per type of data element (e.g., video, images, PDFs, etc.), and per download method type (live, web portal, XML, JSON, CSV).
• The SEO of each page is to be improved, as well as missing explanatory notes need to be added.

Private Brand Dashboard

Our first priority is to expand the publicly visible statistical data as described above. But, of course, not all data can be shown publicly. Because certain data is privacy-sensitive or might have a confidential nature.

Currently, we provide performance statistics in reports that we set for brand clients in our back-office. One by one, we will move that functionality to the brand rank pages and expand on it. How do we envision this?

Partly, business- or privacy-sensitive data is shown already in the brand’s (Free) Vendor Central account. E.g., the data health or completeness score on product level or authorized resellers.

In a brand dashboard, after brand login, the following data will be made visible:

• the download stats per Authorized Reseller (based on mutual consent), and aggregated for other user types per country per period
• the performance of individual assets used in product pages
• aggregated user information related to interactions with content and content types
• stock-based sales out estimate
• correlations and ratios between key parameters to generate insights
• options to get report notifications
• further download options for analytics data sets

A lot of work to do. And, as we proceed, more details will be provided in subsequent posts.

Martijn Hoogeveen

Founder and CEO of Icecat NV. Investor. Ph.D.