A List

We at Brandwatch thought it would be a good idea to put a list together. End of year retrospectives, reviews of the year, top films and books of the year, these are all part of the fun of this here season. So, after this little intro, we’ll show you ours.

Brandwatch works pretty hard to not only find all those mentions of your brand that matter, but also to then scan these mentions for their sentiment – what thay are saying about you, what their problem is, what pleases them. To reflect this endeavour we’ve put a list together that represents those brands that have been in our system for most of the year, and that give us a solid and prevailing reading of each brand’s sentiment. We have also included a volume number for each brand. This is the number of mentions from which we analysed sentiment. You can Interact with the list to place the brands in terms of most positive, most negative. Also, the display gives you an idea of how emotive a brands is – the extent to which it elicits fevered and polarized opinion. We believe that it’s all about the numbers – the detailed breakdown of the sentiment a brand elicits in the people who talk about it.

It is worth saying that this list does not cover all the brands in our system. No where near. Just those that have reached a certain volume threshold of mentions over a significant portion of the last year, AND that our sentiment classifiers are more than happy with. So, for example, brands such as the IQ (very positive sentiment, so far) and the new Sega Sonic game (showing a fascinating mix of opinion around its impending launch) are not included here, simply because we don’t quite have enough data to confidently place them in this list. In the next few days, maybe. Each day means a new layer of data.

We are happy to place our list next to those made by other media analysers, to show-up the different angle of approach made by this particular list of ours:

• The BrandIndex Top 100 2007
• The Millward Brown Top Brands Page
• The Brandwatch top 200

It will hopefully become clear that the size of a brand – its fame – is not over-riding at Brandwatch. Our list is not necessarily so much about the size of the brand as much as it is about the sentiment the brand elicits. Consequently, a brand does not have to be a global or even a national heavy-weight to feature: we want to also find and take notice of those brands that people talk about in specailized fields. It is why companies like ‘Norton’ are in there, ADHD brands, too, and the film ‘Wall-E’, together with those monsters, Barclays and Jaguar. Enjoy!

P.S. Let me add one little thing. We are currently developing a feature which will dig even further into the data and then separate off and show those ‘special’ mentions about a brand – those mentions out there which are the most revealing, pertinent, and most key, the most telling of the telling, the ones which reflect the heart of an issue around a brand. This will be coming very soon!