••• brand research
NFL tops list of 2017’s buzziest brands
Amazon, Facebook and Walmart up there too
Faced with the controversy surrounding the national anthem protests, the National Football League (NFL) topped a list of the buzziest brands in 2017, generating a total buzz of 64 percent, with 36 percent being negative buzz and 28 percent being positive buzz, according to findings from New York-based research firm Morning Consult’s Buzziest Brands in America Rankings.
The rankings of the companies, brands and organizations that caught Americans’ attention – positively and negatively – in 2017 were created using data from nearly 1 million surveys with U.S. adults 18+ across the United States from January to December. Respondents evaluated a randomized set of brands across a range of questions such as favorability, buzz, community impact and purchasing intent.
Tech giants dominated the upper half of the list, with Amazon (#2), Facebook (#3) and Google (#9) all landing in the 10. News rivals Fox News and CNN ranked fourth and 17th, respectively, in a politically-charged year. Brands facing public scandals including United (#7), Uber (#10) and Papa John’s (#19) were within top 20.
The Buzziest Brands of 2017
Rank Brand Total Buzz
1 National Football League 64%
2 Amazon 61%
3 Facebook 60%
4 (tie) Walmart 59%
Fox News 59%
6 McDonalds 58%
7(tie) Netflix 57%
United 57%
9 Google 56%
10 Uber 55%
11 Apple 54%
12 Verizon 53%
13 (tie) Coca-Cola 52%
Starbucks 52%
Target 52%
Walt Disney 52%
Subway 52%
18 CNN 51%
19 (tie) Dominos 50%
Papa John’s 50%
While public perception of brands NFL, Pepsi, Uber, United and Wells Fargo took a beating last year due to multiple controversies, not all of them saw the public turn against them as a result. United Airlines’ favorability dropped 20 percent following a tumultuous period with some highly publicized controversies but recovered less than six months later due to consumers’ short memories and the airline industry’s limited choices.
The inaugural edition of Morning Consult’s Buzziest Brands surveyed 947,604 adults across the United States to rank which companies, organizations or brand names garnered the most attention, for positive or negative reasons. The data come from Morning Consult Brand Intelligence. The top 20 brands – drawn from at least 900 – caught the eyes of U.S. consumers surveyed online from Jan. 1 through Dec. 7 among a national sample of adults who were asked to indicate whether they’d seen, heard or read something positive or negative about a given brand. Between 10,000 and 117,000 adults rated each brand and the results have a margin of error between 0.3 and 1 percentage point.
••• shopper insights
Express yourself – just a bit
Online consumers like a little emotion in reviews
Online reviews play an increasingly important role in consumer behavior as more Americans opt to purchase items online. Previously, studies examining the influence of reviews focused on the length of the reviews and whether they were positive or negative. As reported by Liz McCune, new research from the University of Missouri examined how expressions of emotion impact the helpfulness of a review. Among the findings, researchers observed that although some emotion was important to be persuasive, reviews perceived as being overly emotional often were ignored.
“Ranting about a bad experience may be cathartic for the author, but it is counterproductive for reviewers seeking to influence potential buyers,” said Dezhi Yin, assistant professor of management in the school’s MU Trulaske College of Business, in McCune’s article on the study. “Overly emotional reviews appear to be discounted by readers due to their embedded emotion, even when they are providing objectively useful information.”
The findings have implications for both consumers who want to craft impactful reviews and for online sellers who depend on reviews to spur sales. For reviewers, the research shows that feedback with a more balanced tone tends to be more influential – as long as some emotion is expressed.
“Our theory is that readers use emotion to infer how much effort and thought went into a review,” Yin said. “When someone writes a flaming, angry review or a gushing, fawning review they are perceived as responding emotionally and not logically. At the same time, reviewers who are overly flat in expressing themselves may be perceived as unhelpful.”
Yin recommends that retailers monitor online reviews, as they can provide early indications of product and service issues. However, he also said it’s wise to not fret over a handful of searing reviews, as their impact is likely limited. In addition, he noted that retail sites should consider review guidelines that encourage a moderate level of emotion to elicit narratives that are most valued.
The study is based on an examination of 400,000 reviews at Apple’s App store. The researchers measured the emotional intensity of each review with linguistic analysis tools, then examined the relationship between emotional intensity and “helpful” votes received. Additionally, the researchers conducted a follow-up survey and two laboratory experiments in which respondents evaluated fictional mobile app reviews that contained the same objective content but different levels of emotion.
“Results from all four studies provided evidence for diminishing returns to emotion,” Yin said. “Readers were much more likely to view a review as helpful when it contained a moderate amount of emotional words and exclamations but not when it was full of such emotional markers.”
The study builds on prior work done by Yin. His 2014 study titled “Anxious or angry? Effects of discrete emotions on the perceived helpfulness of online reviews” was published in MIS Quarterly. “Keep your cool or let it out: Nonlinear effects of expressed arousal on perceptions of consumer reviews” was published in the Journal of Marketing Research.
••• media research
Lots of demand for video-on-demand
Over half of households have Web-enabled device
It’s no secret that in addition to traditional television, viewers also have access to a plethora of subscription video-on-demand content and virtual multichannel providers. As the options for these streaming services have grown, so have the means by which viewers can view them on their TV screens.
Consumers, in turn, are taking action. According to Nielsen’s Q2 2017 Total Audience Report, 58.7 percent of TV homes in the U.S. now own at least one Internet-enabled device capable of streaming to a TV set. The emergence of such devices is satiating consumers’ desire to access content with the press of a button.
Never have viewers had so many options to connect to streaming content on their television set. Whether it be an enabled multimedia device (such as an Apple TV, Google Chromecast, Amazon Fire TV or Roku), game console, or smart TV, nearly 70 million TV households in the U.S. have access to at least one. In fact, the penetration for such devices has grown by 12 percent since June 2016.
Like their overall media habits, consumers seemingly like to have a buffet of options when it comes to their Internet-enabled devices. Of the 69.5 million TV homes with at least an enabled multimedia device, game console or smart TV, 6.5 million of them have access to all three. Smart TVs in particular are increasingly approaching ubiquity and becoming more accessible to the average consumer, as one-third of TV homes now have one of these conveniently Internet-enabled television sets.
Once thought of as mechanisms used solely to play the latest video game release, Internet-enabled game consoles (a subset of all game consoles) have become a key platform through which consumers can stream the latest SVOD content. Such devices can now be found in at least 39 million TV homes – over a third of all TV homes.
Overall, more than a quarter of all TV homes (about 31 million) have at least two devices with the ability to stream content on a TV screen. A common profile of these high-tech homes is emerging as well. Homes with Internet-enabled devices tend to be young, employed and affluent – characteristics that marketers and advertisers crave in an audience.
Nearly half of enabled-device homes are under the age of 45. Enabled-device homes are more likely to have children and have a median income of about $70.5K. About 76 percent of such homes have people in the workforce, a majority of which work in white-collar occupations.
When looking at race/ethnicity, such homes also have a larger proportion of Hispanics and Asian-Americans. Hispanic homes tend to have enabled game consoles and smart TVs, as both of these devices have double-digit penetration percentages for the individual device only, as well as the highest penetration percentage (12.2 percent) for both devices simultaneously across race and ethnicity. Asian-American homes tend to embrace enabled-device technology, as over 75 percent of Asian-American TV households have at least one device.
Not only do consumers own more devices than ever before, they’re also putting them to good use as adults have been spending more time with devices overall. Daily time spent for adults in the total population on overall multimedia devices increased in second-quarter 2017, continuing a trend seen from the second quarter of 2015 to the second quarter of 2016. While time spent on all game consoles remained flat, usage of apps and the Web on a smartphone or tablet saw notable lifts in time spent. Overall, media usage increased by half an hour in the second quarter of 2017.
Current trends point to the increased adoption of newer technologies in TV homes, especially as Internet-enabled devices become more widely available and increasingly more useful. With their ability to easily connect users with streaming services, these devices are vital in the effort to provide consumers with both traditionally linear and exclusively streaming content when they want and how they want, all from the comfort of the TV screen.
••• packaging research
See change and sea change
Five trends for 2018 from Mintel
Packaging will play a pivotal role in reducing global food and product waste and brands who adopt clear and succinct package messaging will be rewarded as consumers prefer brands that embrace minimalism, according to Chicago researcher Mintel’s list of five trends it believes are set to impact the global packaging industry over the coming year.
Packaged planet. The throwaway culture of today will evolve into one that understands and embraces the role of packaging as a primary means to reduce global food and product waste. Consumers have long considered packaging as often unnecessary and ultimately as just waste to be disposed of. But that misconception is now changing. A focus on package innovations that extend food freshness, preserve ingredient fortification and ensure safe delivery is increasingly benefiting consumers. Brands will need to act fast by exploiting on-pack communication tools to educate consumers to the benefits packaging can bring, from extending shelf life of food to providing efficient and safe access to essential products in developed and underserved regions of the world.
rEpackage. As more and more consumers embrace online shopping, packaging will play a pivotal role in brands’ and consumers’ e-commerce experiences. Online shopping is becoming increasingly widespread around the globe and is near ubiquitous in some markets. However, while online shopping’s key advantage is convenience, consumers expect more from their favored brands. When designing packaging to be viewed online, and transit packaging to be opened upon delivery in the home, the experience of e-commerce packaging must reflect consumer expectations from shopping with that brand in-store.
Clean label 2.0. Aiming for packaging designs that enlighten consumers’ purchase decisions, brands will reject approaches that offer too much or too little as they can leave shoppers more confused than informed. Today’s consumers are more informed than ever; however, brands are in real danger of being rejected if consumers feel overloaded with information, leading to the questioning of provenance, authenticity and transparency. The “essentialist” design principle bridges the divide between not enough and just enough of what’s essential for consumers to make an enlightened and confident purchasing decision. Brands must bring the next generation of clean label to packaging design to provide a moment of calm and clarity for shoppers in an increasingly hectic retail environment.
Sea change. Plastic packaging adrift in the world’s oceans will become the catalyst driving brands to rethink packaging in a context consumers can understand and act upon. Concerns over safe packaging disposal will increasingly color consumers’ perceptions of different packaging types and impact shopper purchase decisions. Only by communicating that a brand is working toward a solution will this growing barrier to purchase be overcome. While collecting waste plastic from the sea to recycle into new packaging can raise consumer awareness, it won’t solve the problem. In order to keep plastic out of the sea, a renewed effort toward the circular economy is needed to keep packaging material in use.
rEnavigate. Brands will look to contemporary packaging formats to help reinvigorate the center-of-store aisles less visited by younger consumers. Young shoppers are increasingly “shopping the periphery,” visiting the fresh and chilled aisles around the store perimeter and turning their backs on processed, ambient and frozen offerings in the center of the store. The use of transparent materials, contemporary design, recyclability or unique shapes can help draw in younger consumers to the store center, making it as appealing as the burgeoning perimeter to younger consumers.
A free report on the 2018 global packaging trends is available at www.mintel.com/global-packaging-trends (registration required).