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Back-to-School Shoppers Clamor for Target and Old Navy: NetBase Brand Passion Index Reveals Favorite Retailers
Style, Discounts and Selection Make Stocking Up for the School Year a More Positive Experience According to Thousands of Social Media Conversations
MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif.—August 11, 2010—NetBase, the Insight Discovery company, today announced the latest Brand Passion Index, which measures consumer insights around popular retail brands Target, Old Navy, JC Penney, Macy’s, Sears, K-Mart and Walmart for the back-to-school shopping season. Target and Old Navy were associated with the most positive sentiment, while shoppers expressed more intense negative sentiment for K-Mart and Walmart, according to NetBase’s ConsumerBase tool which surfaces emotions and passion levels associated with brands using Natural Language Processing technology.
Among the seven brands analyzed in ConsumerBase from a number of online sources (public internet, premium content from publishers and social media) between Aug. 2, 2009 and Aug. 2, 2010, Target had the highest volume of intensely positive feelings with 54 percent, followed closely by Old Navy which garnered the most passionate positive sentiment. On the other end of the spectrum, Walmart earned the most passionate negative sentiment at 59 percent.
In this graphic, the amount of sentiment and chatter about a brand is indicated by the size of the bubble, while the placement of the bubble shows the intensity of passion.
Target not only received the highest volume of intense positive – “love” and “like” — feelings, but also the highest volume of chatter for helping shoppers stay within budget as a one-stop-shop for stocking up on back-to-school items:
“Ah thank you Target for my shopping experience and staying within my budget”
“I love Target because it’s one-stop shopping for everything and they are excellent with selection, coupons and prices“
“I love Target because their clearance racks for kids clothes have way more selection and the prices are way cheaper”
Old Navy shoppers expressed the most intense “love,” but less volume than Target, with positive emotions expressed for the retailer’s style and selection at affordable prices:
“I love Old Navy because they have good quality cute clothes at low prices!”
“I love Old Navy because they have the best prices and a wide selection of clothes to choose from”
Walmart and K-Mart shoppers showed the most passionate negative – “hate” and “dislike” – feelings, citing poor quality of the apparel and a negative shopping experience:
“Better your child chooses a few things she likes and wears, than a bunch of tacky K-Mart stuff which screams ‘cheap’ and makes her unhappy”
“I don’t think K-mart clothes hold up very well”
“Personally I don’t like Walmart’s clothes because the quality is terrible”
Also of note: JC Penney generated the same intensity of positive sentiment as Target but in much smaller doses, generating far fewer comments from shoppers. Macy’s and Sears both received a fair amount of chatter, but the positive sentiment for their brands was much less passionate.
About the Brand Passion Index
Each month, the Brand Passion Index analyzes consumer passion for brands in various categories and publishes the results on the NetBase blog. To generate the Index, ConsumerBase reads online conversations and extracts the meaning while capturing the intensity of emotions that consumers express about a brand. The combination of passion intensity and amount of chatter determines the consumer emotional involvement level in each brand.
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About NetBase
NetBase provides insight discovery tools that are changing the way people search. Its next-generation semantic technology reads sentences to surface insights from billions of sources in public and private online information. Patent-pending lenses provide context for search results and intelligently guide users to answers. NetBase solutions are assisting market researchers at Fortune 1,000 companies with netnography and social media understanding and enabling science, technology and medical (STM) publishers to enrich their documents for researchers. Five of the top ten consumer packaged goods companies, including Coca-Cola, and two of the top three STM publishers, including Elsevier, are using NetBase to find answers faster. Based in the heart of Silicon Valley, NetBase is a privately held company. For more information, visit: www.netbase.com.
