Every year we ask how the British public feel about a range of brands in our Brands of British Origin survey. Some of the brands are British, but we throw in a lot of worldwide brands that British people use, too – like Coke, Pepsi, Apple or Amazon.
We collect emotional response using our FaceTrace methodology (which we’ve used to collect more than 5 million emotional responses from 3 million respondents worldwide, giving us the world’s biggest emotional database). How people feel about a brand is partly determined by category as well as the brand’s own qualities – no banks ever perform very well! But looking at the changes in a brand’s performance, its standing against its competitors, and the reasons given for the emotional response, can provide valuable insights.
One of the brands we ask about is Facebook – a brand with an enviable level of regular usage, a continuous presence in British life, and a compelling mission to keep you in constant connection with your friends. Surely people feel good about Facebook?
Well… not really.
The overwhelming emotion is neutrality – the absence of emotion. There’s some happiness, but a smattering of negative emotions too: contempt, anger, even fear. (When we asked people to link brands with attributes, only controversial loans firm Wonga scored higher on “Dangerous” – though this was in the wake of the Facebook “emotional manipulation” experiment.) At the end of the analysis, we give each brand a star rating: 5 stars is an iconic brand, 1 star is a weak brand. Facebook gets 2 stars: a pedestrian brand.
So people in Britain, at least, take Facebook for granted, perhaps even resent it a little. What’s interesting is the company it keeps. Surrounding it in the rankings are electricity suppliers like British Gas and EDF, telcos like BT, and the more likeable financial services brands. It’s an everyday necessity, in other words, not anything to love. Facebook has become – in emotional terms – a utility company.
This puts marketers in a slightly awkward position – Facebook is as big and widely-used as ever, with enormous potential reach (if you pay for it) and massive capacity for targeting, but consumers aren’t much enjoying themselves on it. We are living in a post-Facebook world – not in the sense that it’s ‘dead’ or even entering a decline – but in the sense that the novelty has long worn off. Facebook has become part of the background of our lives, and not a part we feel very strongly about.
To learn more about the Brands of British Origin story – including the only 5-star iconic brand in the survey! – get in touch with BrainJuicer.
Tom Ewing will be talking about social media and “post-Facebook” networks at tomorrow’s Customers Exposed event in London.
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