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

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

An organization does not have to be a Gartner client to have their brand be considered in the study. Brands are included based on the volume of their digital marketing activities. The data that informs each Digital IQ is observational and is obtained through manual data collection, proprietary tools and third-party data providers. Brands are scored and placed into one of five classes: Genius, Gifted, Average, Challenged and Feeble.