In other years, such a result would be a cause for gleeful celebration. Instead, the mood is more one of hope and relief. 2021 is set to be a year of recovery. And recovery is a complicated, charged topic to approach after a year so filled with loss and challenges.

There’s a measure of gratefulness in moving forward, but also a determination not to forget hard lessons learned during the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic.

But recovery is also a simple force of economic nature: what goes down, most often will come back up again, if in a somewhat altered form. And going forward, the livelihoods of many people around the world will, indeed, depend on how well businesses and brands can understand and harness the forces of economic recovery.

In this way, Kantar’s work has gained a new purpose: aiding in the rebuilding of a more advanced and innovative global economy. We know that the world will be different – that, post-pandemic, stakeholders of all stripes will hold brands to new and higher standards. Across all industries, and in all markets, CEOs and CMOs will need to quickly adjust to these new expectations around trust, value, and mutual responsibility.

For Kantar BrandZ™, the process of navigating these changes starts with gaining a clear picture of “what is” - of understanding what has changed, and what remains constant, in the world of branded business. Our proprietary Kantar BrandZ™ database includes information from almost 4 million consumers about their attitudes to (and relationships with) 18,500 brands across 512 categories in 51 markets. All of that produces more than 5.3 billion data points. And with that ‘big data’, comes insight.