What Britain Talks About, and Where They Talk About It
by Steve Thomson, Managing Director, Keller Fay UK, May 2, 2011Tags: Brands, Britain, Food & Dining, Keller Fay Group, offline, online, research, Social media, Steve Thomson, TalkTrack® UK, Travel, WOM, word of mouth
Yes, the weather, football, and – in recent days at least – the Royal Family. But, through Keller Fay Research, we know that most Brits like to talk about the products and services they use, and the brands they love and hate.
Social media is facilitating many of these conversations, of course, but word of mouth (WOM) about brands is as old as branding itself, and it has not gone away as a primary medium of conversation. So in the UK (like the US and most probably other countries), we know that the overwhelming amount of brand-related discussion continues to take place offline – at home, in the office, on the bus, and at the school gate. As Mark Ritson recently noted, it may be somewhat naive to expect consumers to generate huge amounts of WOM for some brands online, but the absence of discussion in social media does not mean UK consumers are silent on these topics. So to know what Britons really talk about, we need to look at both online and offline conversations.
When we do that, we see that many of the brands people talk about are those from categories which are part of everyday life – food & drink, shopping, media & entertainment, and (showing just how central it is in people’s lives these days) technology/telecoms.
Food & drink is the number 1 topic that British consumers have brand-related conversations about. Many of these conversations are about places to get food & drink – supermarkets, restaurants – consumers are keen to share their experiences and, in some cases, are looking for recommendations. It’s much harder for food and drink brands to generate high levels of WOM, though Coke and Nescafe show that it can be done. Coke, in fact, is the 8th most talked about brand in the UK.
Conversation about technology is rampant, with Sony, Apple, and Samsung all in the top 10 for brand conversations. Not surprisingly, technology brands feature particularly among online conversations, but for all 3 of these brands, the majority of their WOM is offline. You can share your iPhone experiences online, but maybe there’s no substitute for seeing and feeling the real thing…
The types of brands we discuss are similar to what we see in markets like the US, but some categories grab the attention of British consumers more so than in some other markets. A good example is travel, a topic Brits love to talk about, even though the brands which feature most – BA, Thomas Cook, Easyjet – are ones which very few of us use frequently.
Tapping into this, the lovehatetravel website/forum launched recently (ironically publicised via the 19th-Century approach of posts in London tube stations); but the focus is more about commuting, and I’m not convinced that this is a sufficiently compelling topic for this type of forum, especially the “love” side of the equation (is “the 8.23 was right on time today” really something you’re going to share?). Travel is a good example of where big-ticket decisions, and the noteworthy and aspirational, matter more than everyday connection and usage.
And that’s a general theme – if it’s a big buying decision, then we know that consumers seek advice and want to talk. But consumers will talk about more mundane categories it might be a stretch to expect the British public to want to share everything online, but worry not, there are plenty of other ways to converse out there. So long as you have, as Molly Flatt points out, the appropriate trigger to get the conversation started.
So for the more everyday brands, it’s a matter of giving consumers something noteworthy to talk about. You might think twice about avoiding clashes with royal weddings though.
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