Brand Index: Discounters’ customers force top shops to up their game July 16, 2014 For consumers, every little helps, and the tills at Aldi and Lidl are ringing as the German discounters attract new and unlikely customers. YouGov’s mid-year BrandIndex’s Buzz rankings show that Aldi tops the list with Lidl coming in fourth, as consumers keep buying habits forged in the downturn. In our Buzz Metric, a measure of [...]
Brand Index: Ashley’s Sports Direct has found the sweet spot among shoppers July 8, 2014 IN RECENT days, shareholders of Sports Direct have finally approved the retailer’s bonus scheme, after years of turning down the firm’s plans to reward founder and deputy chairman Mike Ashley. This award that could potentially see Ashley and up to 3,000 employees share £200m in equity, as long as profits double by 2019. Ashley himself [...]
Brand Index: Holland & Barrett health kick pays off July 1, 2014 FOOD retailer Holland & Barrett has been on a health kick recently, increasing its presence on the high street and online while also boosting its profits. In the last year it has opened seven new stores and 42 new franchises as well as expanding overseas. It has fuelled this growth through cultivating its own-brand range [...]
Low-cost airline Flybe is finding more passengers June 24, 2014 The low-cost airline sector is currently in the spotlight. While much of the focus has been about Ryanair’s charm offensive to reposition itself, fellow carrier Flybe has also made waves in recent months. A few weeks ago, Flybe announced a return to profits and a record number of passengers. After a few turbulent years when [...]
How Obama is having an impact on our view of US brands July 28, 2008 There are still those who would separate business and politics. But they are intimately connected. In a study about a year ago using data from YouGov’s BrandIndex and our tracking of attitudes to America, we examined whether the two were correlated. We found that there was indeed a clear link: as opinions of the US [...]
Public Sector must try harder to please consumer July 15, 2008 Public services have been having a bad time recently, with data disks going missing, concerns about MRSA in hospitals and intense dissatisfaction with the move to fortnightly bin collections by many local authorities. It’s hardly surprising then that only one in five people in the UK believe public services are generally well run. Most of [...]
How Marks & Spark’s reputation helps to predict its share price July 7, 2008 Does it help M&S to be an iconic brand? It has huge traction in the public mind, which can amplify both its successes and its failures. When it does well, everyone notices – but when it reports disappointing results, and the share price plummets, the story is all over our TV screens. And that doesn’t [...]
