All that is very well for CEOs to pat themselves on the back, but for marketers-on-the-street like you and me, their utility is rather questionable. I mean, if I have a couple of billion ringgit in the bank and one day I have a sudden itch to buy the Maybank brand (just the brand, mind you, nothing else), I guess I know which table to look up. But until that day comes, I think I’d rather find something more useful.
Brands, Love and Hate
As a marketer, I’d rather know how much my customers love my brand or hate it. Now, love or hate is rather hard to quantify, but its still a worthwhile venture. After all, don’t you think the adoration that Apple customers have for the company and the brand has something to do with its high Share Price/Earnings ratio? And wouldn’t you say the loathing that most tech consumers have for Microsoft might have something to do with the anti-trust lawsuits brought against it in the USA, Europe and now, China?
However, gauging love and hate has been hard to do. Interviews and surveys are notoriously unrealistic contexts to get people to say what they really feel. Fortunately, there’s the Internet.
Our methodology
There are as many ways to express your disdain for something, your utter lack of respect for its features and its worth, as there are languages. In BM, you can say something is kayu, as in “referee kayu”. In English, there’s “sucks”. As in, “Beckham sucks at everything except free kicks”. Its such a simple, evocative, and for our purposes, extremely useful term.
We used Google to conduct the search “(brand name) sucks”, with all of the 4A’s Malaysian Top 30 brands, to see the number of results that got returned. This search captures the exact two words appearing together in sequence, so that we get actual complaints about the brand on the Internet.
Then, we clean up the data a little bit by eliminating repetitions, and also disqualifying brands whose names are too generic to be captured (such as DiGi, TV3 and Giant). For those brands, we restrict our searches to websites in Malaysia to ensure the actual brands are being referenced, not other things (“TV3 sucks” might refer to a news channel in Norway, for instance, but not for a website hosted in Malaysia).
You could call this research a form of Netnography, but a lurking, pure observational form. With this data, we then compile…
The Brand Unpopularity Index (BUI)
The attached table shows the abbreviated results of the index, some of which are obvious, and some, downright surprising.
First of all, I could not resist the temptation to include “streamyx”, Telekom Malaysia’s broadband product brand, even though it did not feature in Malaysia’s Top 30. I did so because I think one would be hard-pressed to find a more loathed brand in Malaysia. With a score of 10,500 among worldwide web search results and 1,440 in Malaysia web search results, it is far and away the most unpopular Malaysian brand online, and it seems to be growing in unpopularity by the day.
Among the Top 30 Brands in Malaysia, the top 5 most unpopular brands online are (in order) Astro, Maxis, Proton, Celcom and AirAsia. Maxis is a bit of surprise, but the results are unmistakable: with 397 and 174 incidences of the phrase “maxis sucks” recorded worldwide and in Malaysia respectively, it is the clear leader in online complaints as far as mobile telcos go, with about twice as many complaints as the next most unpopular brand, Celcom.
Some other interesting insights include the fact that the most unpopular banks in Malaysia are Maybank, CIMB and RHB, in that order, and that complaints about Proton outweigh Perodua by a factor of approximately 15 to 1.
Caveats and Objections
Of course, there could be some objections to this methodology. Let’s list them:
1. High market share and large number of users leads to higher incidences of complaints. It might be argued by Maxis, for instance, that all this shows is that more people complain about Maxis because more people are using Maxis than others, which gives the impression that Maxis is more unpopular when in actual fact, on a per capita basis, Maxis has fewer complaints per customer.
Answering that is simple: we can weight the complaints on a market share basis, and adjust the scoring accordingly. Now, given that the number of complaints for Maxis outnumber Celcom by about 2 to 1, it would mean that Maxis' market share would have to be twice Celcom's for its complaints to be proportionate. Anyone know Maxis' market share right now? :-)
2. English and Youth Centric. This scoring only reflects English users and more importantly youth users, since youth are more likely to use the word “sucks” or, in fact, use the Internet.
No argument there. We are talking, however, about the English Internet-using public, which is a pretty important demographic. Moreover, this scoring can be adapted to other languages as long as a term can be found that is as efficient and ubiquitous as the term “sucks”. As the Internet gets more ubiquitous, it should become more representative of the population at large.
Listening in
As we trawl through the online complaints, we get a sense of the inherent issues which plague each brand, voiced by customers who simply want to vent (sometimes anonymously) their frustration. Some of these complaints are one-off but some of them sound a recurring note, such as the fact that Astro has no toll-free customer line, that the Proton Waja’s power windows are the work of the devil, and that it is AirAsia’s delays that have generated the ill-will.
Far more important, I believe, for management and marketing executives to listen in on these customers venting than to congratulate themselves on achieving a brand value of RMx million. Listening to theses voices can result in changes both simple and fundamental, from quickly identifying problems in certain products or processes, to, who knows, complete changes in strategy.
For more details on our Netnographic report, email me. Knowing the problem is halfway to knowing the solution!
Too edgy for theSun apparently... rejected by the News Editor!
