GAP, Selfridges and Asda, members of the InternetRetailing UK Top500 stood out as brands with the highest customer sentiment rating in the IRUK 500 Brand Sentiment Tracker for the month of January 2017. In December 2016, by comparison, Waitrose , Asda and Charles Tyrwhitt were the three bands with the highest sentiment. Asda secured the highest volume of customer feedback in both months according to the Tracker, which is researched in collaboration with Clarabridge and assesses publicly visible customer commentary on Twitter and Facebook for 26 Elite and Leading Top500 brands.
For the months of December 2016 and January 2017, Charles Tyrwhitt and GAP , respectively, saw the highest sentiment amongst the retailers included in the Tracker. Sainsbury’s , M&S , Halfords , Morrisons and Homebase were other brands that enjoyed higher-than-average customer sentiment in both months. Second only to the aforementioned Asda, Amazon was the subject of the most social chatter in both months. The two platforms (Facebook, Twitter) hosted a roughly equal volume of public commentary for the retailers. Asda was the exception, with Facebook being the more prominent platform for publicly-shared commentary.
About the Brand Sentiment Tracker
Customers hear about hundreds of brands every day and many of these times they don’t hear from the brand itself; so tracking, building and maintaining higher customer sentiment in social media channels can be a key competitive advantage for a retailer. The Brand Sentiment Tracker assesses publicly-visible customer feedback for 26 Elite and Leading retailers and is researched in collaboration with Clarabridge. Linguistic content is analysed to gauge sentiment, with ‘positive’, ‘negative’, or ‘neutral’ scores assigned to feelings expressed in the text. The Tracker is updated periodically, with some posts focussing on improvements and turnarounds in sentiment at the level of an individual retailer, and others covering the aggregate change in both volume and sentiment.
