Five years of BÍV: what 80 winning brands taught us about strategy.

Bestu Íslensku Vörumerkin

ive years ago, when we set up Bestu Íslensku Vörumerkin, the question we wanted to answer was unfashionably simple. Most marketing awards reward output — a campaign that ran, a film that landed. We wanted to reward outcome. Which Icelandic brands actually are the strongest, regardless of how visible they happen to be in the trade press?

So the format had to be different. Every submission gets scored against the brandr Index — the same instrument we use for commercial Index work — and the data is reviewed by a jury of 110+ Icelandic marketers, executives, and academics. There are no creative categories. No film. No best digital. Just brand strength, measured and re-measured, against the audiences who actually use the brand. The Index is the rules of the game.

We've now done this five times. 312 brands submitted. 80 winners across five editions, twenty categories. Enough sample, finally, to look at the data sideways and ask a different question: what do the winners do that the non-winners don't?

The honest answer is that they do four things, and they do them in a particular order. The order matters more than any one of the four. Below is what we found.

The winners can name their X-factor in one sentence.

This is the most obvious, and somehow still the rarest. Every BÍV winner we've reviewed can answer the question what does this brand do that no one else in your category can credibly claim? — without hesitating, without bullet-pointing, and without using the word "quality."

The non-winners almost never can. We ran a small internal experiment last autumn: we took the leadership-team interviews we'd conducted for fifteen Index engagements and looked at how each team answered that single question. The winners' answers were a sentence. The non-winners' answers were a paragraph, usually starting with the word "we." The longer the answer, the weaker the brand position. There were no exceptions in the sample.

The longer the answer to "what does your brand do that nobody else can claim," the weaker the brand position. There were no exceptions in the sample.

brandr Strategy Team · internal review, Q4 2025

This is what the X step of the VAXA framework was built for. It's also the step almost every team wants to skip. There's a reason — naming an X-factor in one sentence requires sacrifice. It means giving up the things you're almost known for in order to own the thing you're actually known for. Most leadership teams find this culturally hard. The winners find it culturally hard and do it anyway.

The winners can name their X-factor in one sentence.

This is the most obvious, and somehow still the rarest. Every BÍV winner we've reviewed can answer the question what does this brand do that no one else in your category can credibly claim? — without hesitating, without bullet-pointing, and without using the word "quality."

The non-winners almost never can. We ran a small internal experiment last autumn: we took the leadership-team interviews we'd conducted for fifteen Index engagements and looked at how each team answered that single question. The winners' answers were a sentence. The non-winners' answers were a paragraph, usually starting with the word "we." The longer the answer, the weaker the brand position. There were no exceptions in the sample.

The longer the answer to "what does your brand do that nobody else can claim," the weaker the brand position. There were no exceptions in the sample.

brandr Strategy Team · internal review, Q4 2025

This is what the X step of the VAXA framework was built for. It's also the step almost every team wants to skip. There's a reason — naming an X-factor in one sentence requires sacrifice. It means giving up the things you're almost known for in order to own the thing you're actually known for. Most leadership teams find this culturally hard. The winners find it culturally hard and do it anyway.

The winners can name their X-factor in one sentence.

This is the most obvious, and somehow still the rarest. Every BÍV winner we've reviewed can answer the question what does this brand do that no one else in your category can credibly claim? — without hesitating, without bullet-pointing, and without using the word "quality."

The non-winners almost never can. We ran a small internal experiment last autumn: we took the leadership-team interviews we'd conducted for fifteen Index engagements and looked at how each team answered that single question. The winners' answers were a sentence. The non-winners' answers were a paragraph, usually starting with the word "we." The longer the answer, the weaker the brand position. There were no exceptions in the sample.

The longer the answer to "what does your brand do that nobody else can claim," the weaker the brand position. There were no exceptions in the sample.

brandr Strategy Team · internal review, Q4 2025