BERA.ai's 2025 Brand Equity Report Reveals Why Some Brands Grew While Others Lost Ground
New data shows Meaningfulness and Uniqueness are the clearest predictors of pricing power, loyalty, and revenue
The 2025 BERA.ai Brand Equity Report is out, and it makes a compelling case for something many commerce leaders already feel in their gut. The brands that grew this year did so because they felt relevant and distinct to their audiences. The brands that lost momentum were still recognized, but people stopped feeling connected to them.
The report uses BERA’s FRMU framework, which tracks four dimensions of brand health: Familiarity (how well people know the brand), Regard (how positively they feel about it), Meaningfulness (how much the brand matters in someone’s life), and Uniqueness (how clearly it stands apart). Together, these metrics form a real-time signal that predicts business outcomes across categories.
The Winners: Shared Audiences and Clear Positioning
Chase and United Airlines stood out as a partnership that works because both brands serve customers who expect reliability and quality. Among United customers, Chase hit 98.2% awareness, 86.1% consideration, and 63.8% usage. That is an unusually strong funnel for a financial services brand, and it happened because the two brands reinforce each other at moments where money and travel intersect.
Applebee’s and IHOP showed how co-location can succeed when customer bases already overlap. Among Applebee’s customers, IHOP had 100% awareness and 90.9% consideration. Breakfast flows to IHOP, lunch and dinner flow to Applebee’s. The positioning is clean and customers understand it intuitively. Both brands rank in the top 25% of all U.S. brands on overall brand equity.
Formula 1 expanded its relevance through cultural visibility, driven largely by Netflix’s “Drive to Survive” series (which premiered in 2019). The brand posted a Uniqueness score of 61.5, the highest among the brands profiled. That sense of being distinctive drew new audiences and pushed consideration up significantly.
Walmart gained strength among high-income households by reinforcing reliability and value in daily shopping. The brand is now second only to Target in this segment.
The Cautionary Tales: Familiarity Without Meaning
Tesla’s numbers tell a clear story about what happens when a brand stays well-known but loses personal relevance. Meaningfulness dropped from 75.47 to 44.07 between Q1 2021 and Q4 2024. That is a 31-point decline. The overall BERA Score fell from 79.87 to 66.92. People still recognized the brand, but they felt less connected to it, and that reduced their willingness to pay. Tesla responded with price cuts that lowered margins, yet U.S. EV market share still dropped from 74.8% to 44.4% over the same period. The report notes that most of this decline came from weaker brand positioning rather than weaker products.
Dell’s decline was more gradual but followed the same pattern. Uniqueness fell 6.08 points (from 88.65 to 82.56), and the overall BERA Score dropped 3.31 points. Younger consumers see Dell as competent and practical, but not distinctive or personally meaningful. The report found that a 1% movement in Dell’s BERA Score predicts a 1.4% movement in revenue six months later. Lower Uniqueness limits interest and reduces the brand’s ability to inspire loyalty.
What This Means for Commerce
The through-line across every case study in this report is the same. People support brands that matter to them and present a clear identity. They step back from brands that feel less meaningful or less distinct, even when those brands remain highly familiar.
For commerce operators, the takeaway is practical. Brand awareness alone is not a growth strategy. The brands that grew in 2025 invested in relevance and differentiation. The brands that lost ground assumed recognition would be enough.
The full BERA.ai 2025 Brand Equity Report includes detailed case studies on each brand profiled, with data drawn from samples ranging from 19,000 to 292,000 respondents.
