Thematic's favorite brands

At a recent Friday team session, Thematic delved into our customers' world by doing a brand survey. Our Friday sessions are less serious, with more emphasis on team-building and creativity.

For each brand, we gave a score (1-5) and a reason for the score. We generated over 800 responses to over 50 high profile brands, including:

• Food and drink: Coca Cola, Pepsi, Red Bull, McDonalds and Pizza Hut
• Social media: Facebook, LinkedIn, Tik Tok, Twitter and YouTube
• Entertainment: Netflix, Disney, Marvel, Spotify and Apple Music

Text analytics is our bread and butter, so instead of going through the responses manually, I fed the data into Thematic to automatically generate insights. Here’s what I found:

If we go by overall score and sentiment, Thematic’s favorite brand is Marvel. A few insights stand out:

• We believe Marvel produces much higher quality content. The Thematic team was more than twice as likely to mention this in their feedback (66% compared to 28%).
• With Marvel, we mention a good time and fun, as well as watching with family and children.
• Marvel fans aren’t even thinking about the price. Nobody mentioned this in their comments, but they do for Disney and Netflix.

But Marvel's win feels too easy. It’s in the entertainment category, and who doesn’t like entertainment? What I’d like to know is what us Themateans don’t like, and why.

I'm also interested in taking various segments - from brand categories and our team - and comparing them.

If you’re a company looking for insights, it’s great to be able to confirm what you’re doing well. But being able to pinpoint an issue, know what’s causing it and which user segments it affects the most - that’s what you're really after.

So let’s dig in and find out what we don't like, the reasons why, and compare various segments to get granular.

The category with the lowest scores? Drink. And Budweiser had the lowest score, at 1.9 out of 5. Thematic is in clear consensus, we don't like the taste!

Looking at our responses for drinks, the biggest issue affecting scores was healthiness, followed by price. We care more about the health of our drinks than the cost.

Actually, healthiness is only considered for non-alcoholic drinks. No one considered healthiness when reviewing alcohol! Branding also more relevant for non-alcoholic drinks, whereas alcoholic drinks were called out for quality.

Comparing food and drinks categories, Thematic is six times more likely to mention price when it comes to food.

When we segment pizza restaurants from the rest of the food category, price is mentioned more often in comparison. The price of pizza matters to Thematic!

Price is not only mentioned more often - it has a negative impact on the score for Dominos and Pizza Hut. Whereas for the rest of the food category, price has a positive impact overall.

But price is the biggest factor in the travel and cars categories. Relatively few of us consider it for drinks, social media (likely because they’re free), and work tools (since Thematic pays for these).

This seems kind of obvious, but it's good to see the analysis confirm real-life expectations and logic.

When we completed our brand survey, our fully remote team was spread across the US, the Philippines, and New Zealand (we have team members in other places now too!).

Comparing the US to the Philippines/New Zealand, the US team is more likely to mention a positive experience (very American of them), branding and healthiness. Thematic's New Zealand and Filipino staff care more about the features, technical performance and quality.

Looking at our lowest ranking brand overall (Huawei), branding and price are both important themes. But the standout is security: Huawei is the only brand where this theme was mentioned.

Price is a positive influence, but both security and branding drag Huawei's score down:

This feels more actionable than the Budweiser insights (unless they decide to change the taste!), but overall not surprising. It’d be interesting to see how our small amount of Thematic comments stack up against the large volume of feedback Huawei receives.

With Thematic doing the heavy lifting, we can get as specific as we'd like to in our analysis- slicing and dicing our qualitative data to answer a multitude of questions. Going by score alone misses all the nuance.

If you'd like to see what Thematic can uncover in your feedback dataset, our team can help! Book a personalized demo here.