ABSTRACT
Nowadays, a lot of studies are trying to measure happiness. There are many indexes that measure progress. We have chosen two of them: Happy Planet Index (HPI) and World Happiness Report (WHR). The first of them, an index from New Economics Foundation, is a measure of sustainable well-being in terms of how countries support their citizens to live good lives now and in the future. It uses global data on experienced well-being, life expectancy, and Ecological Footprint from 151 countries. On the other hand, the WHR, an index from the United Nations and Columbia University for 156 countries, uses six factors to explain this: Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per capita, years of healthy life expectancy, social support, perceptions of corruption, generosity, and freedom to make life choices. Both indexes have used different methodology to measure happiness so some countries present different levels of happiness depending on the index that is used. The first objective of this chapter is to propose a new index, using factor analysis to classify 145 common countries between HPI and WHR and to simplify the ranking in four parts. We found that there are areas like South America that could be considered “happy,” independently of the index (HPI, WHR, new index) and vice versa. Therefore, because there is not a unified measure of happiness at the moment we try to reach an agreement between both of them with this new index.
Without a doubt, worrying about happiness, at an international level, has caused many countries to fight for a privileged place in the rankings published periodically. Big corporations and global brands are also aware of this situations, where, very often, an association is made between brand’s names and attributes like subjective well-being or happiness; a struggle exist in the consumer’s mind because brands want to be perceived as vectors to reach the subjective and/or collective well-being. Thus, the second objective of this chapter is to confirm that there exist an association between the level of happiness of a country, according to the new index proposed, and the valuation that consumers make of brands’ contribution to their level of well-being, taking the last Havas’s group study Meaningful brands. This work also delves in the relation between the optimism percentage about the future situation and the valuation that citizens do of brands contribution in their well-being level.
