721 Australian Businesses Scored, and Funeral Homes Out-Brand the Banks

The Take: Ask most marketers which Australian industries have the strongest brand positioning and they will name banks, SaaS companies or premium retail. The data says otherwise. Funeral homes, charities and landscapers out-score them all. Trust and ceremony beat polish, and the businesses that sell neither are the ones actually paying for it.

We scored 721 Australian businesses across 70 industries on six dimensions, one of which is Brand & Positioning: how clearly a business signals what it stands for, and how consistently that shows up. The national average is 64.2. The gap between the strongest and weakest industry is 22 points, and the industry sitting on top is not the one most marketers would guess.

Funeral Services & Memorial leads the country on Brand & Positioning, averaging 74.2, ahead of banking, government marketing and B2B SaaS, three sectors that spend heavily on brand as a matter of course.

Funeral Services & Memorial, Landscaping & Garden Services and Residential Real Estate all have fewer than 10 businesses in our dataset, so treat those three rankings as directional rather than settled. What is not directional is the pattern behind them.

Look at who owns the top of this table and a pattern appears fast. White Lady Funerals scores 82 on Brand & Positioning in our dataset. Simplicity Funerals scores 78. Both are owned by InvoCare, the funeral operator TPG Capital took private in 2023 in an A$1.83 billion buyout. A private equity firm paid nearly two billion dollars for a portfolio of funeral brands, and the brand discipline that justified the price shows up directly in the score.

Cancer Council Australia and Red Cross Australia both score 82 as well, level with White Lady Funerals. These are organisations that cannot compete on price or convenience, so consistent brand signalling is close to the entire commercial strategy. The same logic applies to schools, real estate agencies and government campaigns. When the product is a decision made once, rarely and under emotional weight, brand carries more of the weight because there is no repeat-purchase data or price comparison to fall back on.

The customer-relationship structure behind a business reinforces the same story. Businesses selling through government contracts (B2G) average 69.9 on Brand & Positioning across 721 scored businesses. Businesses selling through an intermediary to an end consumer (B2B2C) average 69.9 as well. Direct B2B and direct B2C businesses average 64.9 and 64.8. The more layers a business has to signal trust through, the harder it works on the signal.

Trades & Emergency Home Services sits at the bottom, averaging 52.1. Individual businesses in that industry range from 32 to 58. These are businesses people call in an emergency. They get chosen on availability and price and rarely get thought about again until the next leak or blackout. There is no ceremony in the purchase, so there has been no pressure to build one.

Do not copy a funeral home's tone. Copy the mechanism. The businesses at the top of this table settled on what they stand for once and then repeated it everywhere: website, signage, invoices, the way staff answer the phone. That consistency is buildable in a trades business, an insurer or a telco. It just has not been prioritised, because none of those categories has been forced to compete on trust the way a funeral home or a charity has.

Every business in this dataset is scored across six weighted dimensions using a mix of machine-observed signals and structured research into each company's public marketing footprint, benchmarked against other businesses in the same industry. This piece draws on 721 businesses scored "Done" across 70 industries with published benchmarks, scored as at May 2026. Industries with fewer than 10 scored businesses (Funeral Services & Memorial, Landscaping & Garden Services, Residential Real Estate) are noted in the table and should be read as directional. Full methodology at how we score.

Stated plainly: Brand & Positioning is the dimension where money spent and score earned line up the least. B2B SaaS spends more on brand than almost anyone and still trails a funeral home. What separates the top of this table from the bottom is not budget, it is whether the business has ever been forced to answer the question "why should I trust you" out loud. If your industry has never had to answer that question, your score is probably lower than you think. Hub will show you where your business sits against your own industry on Brand & Positioning and the other five dimensions.

Two related reads: which businesses actually measure their own marketing, and why conversion gets worse the longer a sale takes.

What does the Brand & Positioning dimension measure?

Brand & Positioning is one of six dimensions in NR's Marketing Score. It measures how clearly a business signals what it stands for and how consistently that signal shows up across its website, marketing and public presence, benchmarked against other businesses in the same industry.

Why do funeral homes and charities score higher on brand than banks or tech companies?

Businesses selling a decision made once, rarely and under emotional weight (funeral care, charitable giving, education, real estate) cannot rely on repeat-purchase data or price comparison to win trust, so consistent brand signalling carries more of the commercial weight. Banks and SaaS companies spend heavily on brand too, but our data shows that spend does not automatically outscore categories where trust is the entire product.

Which Australian industries score lowest on Brand & Positioning?

Trades & Emergency Home Services scores lowest in our dataset at 52.1, followed by Marketplace Sellers, Immigration & Migration Services and IT Services & Managed Services. These are typically categories bought on availability, price or urgency rather than considered trust.

How is the Brand & Positioning score calculated?

NR scores each business using a mix of machine-observed signals and structured research into its public marketing footprint, weighted per industry alongside five other dimensions: Digital Maturity, Acquisition Performance, Conversion Efficiency, Retention & Loyalty and Data & Tracking. Full methodology is published at new-rebellion.com/lens/how-we-score.