"I've only heard good things about you": Excellent reputation accompanies Twint also in 2023
Nowadays, the vast majority of brands are in a highly competitive environment. While "bad publicity" can still be beneficial under certain circumstances for brands that are still unknown, an already well-known and established brand would do well to let the public talk about it in a generally favorable manner. A study now shows which brands have had the Swiss public talking about them in a particularly positive or negative way since the beginning of the year.
Beginning of February m&k already reported on the successful performance of Twint in 2022. Last year, the mobile payment provider was the top performer in terms of supported brand awareness, brand consideration, and customer satisfaction, among other things. The results are based on continuous brand tracking by the market research institute Link, which has been monitoring 200 of the most important brands on a weekly basis since fall 2021 and measuring them from a consumer perspective representative of the population.
Since the end of 2022, the study has also been surveying which brands are talked about positively or negatively in each case, whether in advertising or on social media, but also in conversations with friends, (work) colleagues and relatives. In this case, the source (e.g., advertising, newspaper article, or personal conversation) from which one has heard something negative or positive about a brand also moves into the background. This type of combined attention is also called "buzz", whereby a distinction can be made between "positive buzz" and "negative buzz".
In the first four months of the year or so, the mobile payment provider Twint has had the strongest positive buzz. It leads the ranking of all 200 brands in terms of both absolute peak and average positive buzz. On average, one in ten people said they had heard something positive about Twint in the past 7 days. The highest values were achieved at the end of February / beginning of March in calendar weeks 8 and 9. The peak value here was just under 17 percent of the sample surveyed representative of the population. During this period, the Twint brand was present in the media due to its ongoing success story ("Payment app on the road to success"., "Once ridiculed, Twint now has over 5 million users"). Interestingly, during this period there was not only the peak of positive "buzz", but also that of negative (4 % of respondents). Thus, the reported news did not seem to excite everyone. However, as can be seen in the chart, the positive tenor predominates, as can be read from the green line running significantly higher in each case (see Chart 1). The buzz score (positive buzz minus negative buzz) is by far the highest for Twint, averaging 9 percent.
More negative reporting, more negative attention - and vice versa
SBB and Migros follow in the next two places, each averaging around 9 percent positive buzz per week. In terms of negative buzz, it is the two (former) big banks and the chocolate brand Toblerone that are also discussed in this medium. was reported in detail. Looking at the buzz score - the average difference per week between positive and negative attention - another brand makes it into the top 3: the snack manufacturer Zweifel. It is striking that the negative buzz shows stronger fluctuations than the positive buzz. One reason for this is probably the so-called "negativity bias". On the one hand, people pay more attention to negative news, which in turn leads many media to report more on negative news in order to increase that attention. Positive news about brands is therefore likely to make it less into the news and thus into the conversations of the population - quite the opposite for negative news, which was clearly demonstrated by the takeover of Credit Suisse by UBS.
Figure 2 shows the most controversial brand, SBB: On the one hand, SBB stands out positively to 9 percent of respondents on average; on the other hand, it also attracts negative attention from about 9 percent of respondents. Not visible in Figure 2, but also attracting increased negative attention among the population were Netflix (6.2 %) and Comparis (5.8 %), among others.
Netflix No. 1 on the Swiss streaming market - but for how much longer?
Netflix is another brand that is represented in the Flop 5 in terms of negative buzz. The streaming provider reached the maximum value of the key figure, which has been measured since the end of December, in mid-February, when it became public that Netflix, in its more than 25-year company history, had For the first time in Europe, additional fees are charged when customers share their account with other households.. This shows the all-time low (since the start of measurement in September 2021) of the willingness to pay more for Netflix: Only 3.8 percent of the population was then willing to pay a higher price compared to comparable providers. Even among current Netflix customers, this figure was only just under 10 percent. The perception of quality, the positive basic attitude and brand trust, however, did not suffer - at least in the short term. Compared to the last quarter in 2021, however, these key figures are all pointing downward among Netflix customers (-7.7 percentage points for special quality, -12.7 percentage points for positive basic attitude toward the brand and -5.2 percentage points for special brand trust).
The negative trend is not surprising insofar as the topic of account sharing has been present in various media for a long time and time and again. As early as spring 2022, it became apparent that Netflix would soon put a stop to account sharing. Other providers such as Disney+ or Prime Video are also being critically assessed by their customers and are losing their assessment level (Disney+) or can at most maintain it (Prime Video). Among other things, this is probably related to the increasing competition; for example, Paramount+ has been another competitor in the DACH region since the beginning of December. The more providers there are on the market, the more difficult it will be to stand out positively. At the moment, Netflix is still by far the clear No. 1 in the Swiss streaming market. How this gap will develop remains to be seen. One thing is certain: Link's brand tracking continues to monitor.
Method profile
- Population: Swiss resident population aged 15 to 79 years
- Around 250 interviews per brand per calendar week and brand segment
- Research method: online interviews
- Quotation/weighting: interlocked by age, gender and region
- Random samples from the Link Online Panel, 100 percent of which are actively recruited through representative telephone surveys, thus reaching more than 97 percent of the relevant population; survey participants are excluded from follow-up surveys for at least three months at a time
- Survey period: 19.12.2022 to 30.04.2023
- Project management: Link, Zurich; Stefan Reiser, Managing Director Marketing Research
