A BRANDWATCH AND MUMSNET SPECIAL REPORT
How Parents View Brands
Using Mumsnet data to discover the consumer preferences of parents
13 Minute Read
See the data in actionMumsnet is the UK’s largest and most active forum for parents. With 14 million monthly users and 1 million posts a month, it’s one of the world’s largest online communities.
Mumsnet users are anonymized and there is no limit on the length of their posts. Because of this, parents regularly express views, opinions, and advice on a variety of topics. Mumsnet hosts descriptive conversations that provide more consumer insight than most posts or comments on typical social networks.
We’ve used this data to discover how parents communicate online. We’ve looked at the general types of conversations they have, the brands they talk about and some of the preferences they reveal.
Consumer insight
Parents represent one of the largest monetary opportunities for consumer brands. They manage purchases and dictate where the family’s disposable income is spent each year.
Unsurprisingly, brands conduct extensive research to try and understand what these parents think. They want to answer questions like, how was my latest campaign perceived? Which of my competitors are performing well? What would encourage my customers to spend more?
Previously, answers to these questions have only been found in focus groups, surveys and other forms of traditional research. Now, with social listening, brands have a chance to discover insight from another source.
The most talked about brands
Unlike traditional research, social listening lets us analyze consumer preferences at a macro scale. For instance, we can quickly see the most talked about brands by parents on Mumsnet:
Rank | Brand | Conversations detected |
---|---|---|
1 | BBC | 22,995 |
2 | Tesco | 20,768 |
3 | IKEA | 10,804 |
4 | NHS | 7,428 |
5 | Waitrose | 6,668 |
6 | McDonald's | 6,596 |
7 | Ford | 5,803 |
8 | Coca-Cola | 3,854 |
9 | Argos | 3,792 |
10 | Debenham | 3,332 |
11 | Visa | 2,909 |
12 | RSPCA | 2,708 |
13 | Starbucks | 2,423 |
14 | Ryanair | 2,277 |
15 | Marks and Spencer | 2,244 |
16 | Gap | 2,146 |
17 | Netflix | 1,861 |
18 | Chanel | 1,828 |
19 | Topshop | 1,700 |
20 | Nike | 1,693 |
As expected, Mumsnet users talk more about British brands. After all, the site is used mainly by UK residents.
What’s interesting, however, is the diverse range of brands at the top. In the top eight, we see seven different industries represented, revealing a diverse range of conversation taking place on the site.
But what puts BBC at the top?
Analyzing the top themes, it appears that discussion about news articles, specifically Brexit encourages this conversation. In fact, almost 2,000 conversations that mention the BBC also reference Brexit each year.
Surprisingly, other sources of news don’t garner the same volumes of conversation.
The Guardian and Daily Mail come in at second and third in generating conversation about news, but the BBC is referenced far more, especially when compared to other television networks like ITV.
However, the BBC appears to be an outlier when it comes to general conversation. Despite being talked about the most, other industries appear to generate more conversations.
The most talked about industries
Rank | Brand | Conversations detected |
---|---|---|
1 | Department Stores | 42,482 |
2 | Television | 21,805 |
3 | Fast Food | 9,979 |
4 | Automotive | 9,190 |
5 | Public | 6,854 |
6 | Technology | 4,858 |
7 | Soft Drinks | 4,781 |
8 | Apparel | 4,489 |
9 | FMCG | 3,350 |
10 | Fashion | 3,299 |
11 | Non Profit | 3,073 |
12 | Airlines | 2,894 |
13 | Payment Cards | 2,784 |
14 | Hotels | 1,303 |
15 | Telecoms | 1,182 |
16 | Consumer Banking | 799 |
17 | Beer | 657 |
18 | Spirits | 281 |
19 | Energy | 204 |
20 | Insurance | 197 |
Department stores (which include a fairly large group of both supermarkets and general retail stores) come out on top. The most mentioned brands in this group are:
- Tesco
- IKEA
- Waitrose
- Argos
- Debenhams
Further analysis into these conversations reveals how parents perceive them. Do they see one store as being too expensive? Or another as being tacky and cheap? Searching for these brands in combination with words expressing these views (e.g. “Waitrose costs too much”) reveals this difference.
This reveals genuine insight for each brand. Halfords garners the highest percentage of ‘cheap’ discussion followed by IKEA and Argos.
Topshop, on the other hand, is seen by parents to be significantly more expensive, with 65% of priced based discussion referencing how expensive the brand is. Interestingly, they’re followed by arguably more expensive brands like House of Fraser, Waitrose and M&S.
The brands generating the most positivity
Positivity towards brands isn’t a typical business KPI. Most choose to focus on more tangible figures like sales or stock price.
But with more and more data available around how consumers feel, positivity can become a good proxy for performance. Did consumers react positively towards your latest campaign? Were your customers more positive towards a competitor’s campaign? Understanding this helps brands measure performance.
So, which brands garner the most positivity from parents? Using Brandwatch’s sentiment analysis we’re able to discover the brands that are most likely to generate positivity from their consumers.
Dior, New Balance and Ralph Lauren lead the way. Over 80% of the emotive discussion about these brands is positive, putting them ahead of the 200 other brands we analyzed. Honorable mentions go to Honda and Kia, which lead the way in the automotive industry, plus M&S and John Lewis, which appear ahead of every other retailer on positivity.
Interestingly, four of the top twelve positive brands are in the fashion industry: Dior, Ralph Lauren, Swarovski and Gucci. To discover what causes this positive discussion we sorted the data into the top key themes:
- Looking / feeling good (439 conversations per year)
- Finding a good price (325 conversations per year)
- Buying a present for a friend (209 conversations per year)
These three themes generate positivity for luxury brands. While you could argue that luxury brands obviously focus on making consumers feel and look good, they probably underestimate the impact finding a good price, or buying a present for a friend has on positivity.
Perhaps fashion brands should experiment with campaigns that encourage consumers to purchase gifts for friends; it’s clearly something parents enjoy doing.
The brands generating the most negativity
Understanding positivity around your brand is important, but detecting negativity is vital.
A negative conversation about your brand has the ability to spread and seriously harm your image. There are countless examples of large brands like United, McDonald’s and Apple witnessing significant drops in sales, stock price and market share following negative discussions online.
Take Snapchat. In 2017 the growing tech company lost a reported $1.3 billion following a single negative tweet.
Brands must keep an eye on their negativity online, especially from high-value groups like parents.
Two telecoms providers, BT and Sky, generate the most negativity. More than 60% of the emotive discussion about them on Mumsnet is negative, more than every other brand we analyzed.
The main driver for this negativity is complaints. Parents regularly use Mumsnet to vent about problems they’ve experienced with those brands. Using Brandwatch’s categorization functionality, we were able to segment this data to reveal to most common complaints.
Consumers complained most about the high prices and the faulty products. The two telecom providers should be actively thinking of ways to reduce this. Perhaps campaigns indicating their low prices could help, or an independent assessment to reveal that their products break less than cheaper rivals.
Most ideas would be better than simply ignoring these complaints. Thousands of potential consumers view these complaints every day. One negative review could cost hundreds of new customers.
As well as telecom brands, two soft drinks manufacturers, Red Bull and Pepsi, generate high levels of negativity. Unsurprisingly, parents complain most about the amount of sugar in the products (64%) followed by the amount of caffeine (22%) and the unsatisfactory taste (14%).
The most positive and negative industries
In the case of Sky and BT, their high levels of negativity might not be solely down to the brand. The industry they are in may also have an effect.
To analyze this, we’ve grouped the 200 brands we analyzed by industry to reveal the differences.
The fashion, hotel, beer and department store industries lead the way in generating the highest percentages of positive conversation.
Telecom, payment card, public sector and television organizations drive more negativity with more than half of their emotive conversations displaying negative language.
At face value, this research appears perhaps as we’d expect. It’s pretty obvious why fashion brands generate more positivity than telecom brands.
But digging into the data reveals some surprising insights.
- Despite regular bad press, fast food brands generate more positive mentions then non-profit brands
- While consumer banks generate a mix of positivity and negativity, the payment cards those banks use are complained about more
- Beer brands actually generate more positive conversations than spirits
Industry spotlight: Airlines
One of the more interesting industries for parents is air travel. The average UK family spends £4,792 on their summer holiday and flights represent a large chunk of this cost. Digging into this data can help us understand why families pick one airline over another. Let’s start by looking at the airlines they chat about the most.
Rank | Brands |
---|---|
1 | RyanAir |
2 | EasyJet |
3 | British Airways |
4 | KLM |
5 | Virgin Atlantic |
Ryanair and EasyJet lead the way with the highest volumes of conversation, but what type of conversation is it? To understand that, let’s look at the sentiment behind each airline.
Despite high volumes of conversation from parents, the sentiment for Ryanair, British Airways and EasyJet is far negative than other airlines.
What is it about these airlines that drives this negative feedback?
The majority of British Airway’s negative conversation was caused by a data breach that affected 380,000 transactions. While Ryanair’s negative chatter was due to delays following strikes, poor customer service due to their lack of seat-space, and one bad experience after a child with chickenpox was allowed to board the plane.
While sentiment and common complaints provide vital data for measuring brand health, Mumsnet can also shed light on consumer preferences. The following list reveals the holiday destinations parents talked most about in summer 2018:
- France 🇫🇷
- Australia 🇦🇺
- Los Angeles 🇺🇸
- United States 🇺🇸
- Canada 🇨🇦
- Bristol 🇬🇧
- Brighton 🇬🇧
- Japan 🇯🇵
- Netherlands 🇳🇱
- New Zealand 🇳🇿
This information is vital for travel companies planning, creating and marketing new holiday destinations.
Canada, for instance, is being talked about almost 2x more than last year. Airlines could use this insight to offer a bespoke deal for families, helping them capture this lucrative, growing market.
Industry spotlight: Automotive
Parents are vitally important to those working in the automotive industry. They decide which family car to buy, they decide whether or not to buy their teenager a car, they have preferences on which cars are safe and which aren’t.
Understanding how parents view your car can significantly help you in your marketing and product development. But to start, let’s look at the automotive brands that are talked about the most.
Rank | Brand |
---|---|
1 | Ford |
2 | BMW |
3 | Audi |
4 | Nissan |
5 | Vauxhall |
6 | Honda |
7 | Land Rover |
8 | Toyota |
9 | Fiat |
10 | Volvo |
11 | Kia |
12 | Renault |
13 | Mini |
14 | Hyundai |
15 | Jaguar |
16 | Mazda |
17 | Tesla |
18 | Volkswagen |
19 | Mercedes-Benz |
Ford leads the way in total conversations, followed by BMW, Audi and Nissan.
However, to truly understand how parents perceive these brands we should segment conversation by the types of words they use to describe each brand.
The chart below reveals how the brands are perceived.
Land Rover, Mercedes and Jaguar are among the most likely to be referred to as “luxury,” while Volkswagen dominates chatter around, “safety.” Interestingly, Mazda has sparked chatter around its vehicles’ “fuel efficiency” while Honda is noted for its “handling”.
Businesses can use social intelligence to dig into each category and uncover the verbatim conversations surrounding certain aspects of their vehicles.
Such analysis helps companies gain a sense of how their audiences are describing their competitors’ brands and cars, which can help direct marketing messaging and even provide valuable feedback for future car models and designs.
Industry spotlight: Fast Food
Fast food shouldn’t be classified as something families spend a large portion of their household budget on. However, it is something that drives a lot of discussion for parents. Questions like “how much fast food should my child eat”, and “are there any good vegan fast food options” could be the key to helping brands grow their consumer base.
Let’s begin the analysis by looking at the brands that generate the highest volumes of conversation.
Rank | Brand |
---|---|
1 | McDonald's |
2 | Starbucks |
3 | KFC |
4 | Dominos |
5 | Pizza Hut |
6 | Burger King |
7 | Subway |
McDonald’s leads the way as the most talked about fast food brand, followed by Starbucks and KFC.
Fast food chains divide opinions, some parents don’t let their children near fast food, others are happy to visit a chain once or twice a week. To understand how consumers perceive each brand, we’ve broken the conversation down by sentiment.
Dominos generates the highest percentage of positive conversation. Interestingly, the main driver of this positivity was its gluten-free pizzas.
KFC currently generate the most negativity. While most of the negativity centers around bad in-store experiences, some negativity was caused by a recent radio advert.
To better understand how likely parents are to allow children to consume fast food, we analyzed how healthy or unhealthy they thought each fast food chain’s products were.
Starbucks is consistently seen as healthier than other fast food brands. The Seattle coffee company have built a perception with parents that it’s better for you than McDonald’s, KFC and others.
This is great for Starbucks as it increases their pool of potential customers. Interestingly though, it’s not technically true. In fact, Starbucks’ chicken and bacon panini (620 calories) contains more calories than a Big Mac (540 calories) and the coffee company’s cinnamon roll frappuccino (510 calories) is worse for you than a KFC Zinger burger (480 calories).
While these are just specific examples, it highlights how successful Starbucks has been in building a healthy brand image.
Conclusion
The purpose of this report was to shed light on the type of insight we can now collect from the web. Instead of seeing social listening as an opportunity to measure the number of retweets or likes you received, it should be viewed as a source for answering important business questions.
If you’re regularly asking yourself “how is my product being used?”, “what parts of my competitor’s products do my customers want?”, or “which of my customers are most likely to leave?”, then you should look to data for answers.
Mumsnet represents just one of the 95 million sites Brandwatch crawls, yet this site alone provides vital data for brands. What’s more, this data is available instantly, as it happens. Conversation from the site appears in real-time, letting you measure a campaign or a crisis as it develops.
It’s also not riddled with common research bias. The issues traditional research faces with collection errors, confirmation bias and leading question bias aren’t present. Instead, researchers can monitor a candid, real discussion, rather than a manufactured one. That said, we shouldn’t dismiss the potential problems with social listening, specifically the inadequate sample base.
We urge brands to look at the rich sources of data, like Mumsnet. Take a look at how parents talk about your brands, your products, your competitors and your campaigns. Measure that over time and start to spot threats and opportunities that could be vital for your business.
Expert Conclusions
Matt Navarra
“Parents don’t just communicate in social. In fact, for opinionated discussion from parents, you probably need to look elsewhere.
Mumsnet clearly provides a solution for brands seeking to understand this audience. I’d push users of this data to mix it with their existing social data to get a holistic understanding of their audience.” – Matt Navarra, Social Media Consultant
Ben Donkor
“Mumsnet has been a big part of the UK online ecosphere for a long time. It’s a great hub of early adopters and consumer savvy parents recommending to each other. Whether you’re looking for suggestions on how to improve your existing products/services or need suggestions for new ones, Mumsnet is a great trove of information tapping into a very diverse community, as this report clearly shows.
Now thanks to Brandwatch, brands have access to a much wider index of information while making sure that their analysis reflects this diverse community and their stories, experiences and opinions.” – Ben Donkor, Director of Research and Insights
Jillian Ney
“It’s really exciting that we can now get Mumsnet data and historic data for the last 5 years via Brandwatch. Much of my own research is focused on forums and other alternative data sources, and it’s now going to be easier to analyze from Mumsnet – something I largely did manually until now.
This is a really big untapped source of insight for the parent market. This Brandwatch report highlights attitudes towards brands, to get even more out of the data for your organization, you could start to look at opinions and behaviors driving different topics or concerns.” – Jillian Ney, UK’s first Dr of Social Media, Founder of The Social Intelligence Lab.
Tim Hughes
“Brandwatch’s report has really drilled down into the parent’s view of brands reality. So often as marketers, we make assumptions based on our own world or own circumstances. The data doesn’t lie, and here we can see the real world, just imagine what this could do for your own brand?” – Tim Hughes, CEO and Co-Founder at Social Experts
Sean Meehan
“Parents are increasingly turning to each other for advice and the Mumsnet forum has always been a fantastic community to share opinions and recommendations on brands, products and retailers.
These conversations on how a family’s disposable income is spent – and how this is often greatly influenced by children – brand owners have not had visibility of until now. This new development from Brandwatch represents another improvement into how businesses can greatly align their offering to the needs of parents.” – Sean Meehan, previously Boots UK, Social Media and Strategy Manager.
Daniel Rowles
“This level of social media insight is fantastically useful” – Daniel Rowles, Target Internet
Methodology
Scope
In this report, we analyzed how parents communicated on the UK site, Mumsnet. To conduct this analysis, we used the world’s leading social listening platform, Brandwatch Analytics.
We collected every post on Mumsnet over a 100 day period (June 12 – Sept 19, 2018). In total we analyzed well over two million posts. In order to make sense of this data, we create categories to break-down the data and discover how brands, topics and general themes were talked about.
Brandwatch analysis
Access to Mumsnet: Brandwatch is the first social listening platform to have full access to Mumsnet data. We used this access to conduct the research for this report.
Rules & Categories: to segment data we used Brandwatch’s rules, which rely on Boolean logic, allow users to separate specific conversations into specific categories. Rules can be understood as “queries within queries.”
Emoji Detection: Brandwatch can pick up usage of emojis published by any operating system.
Sentiment: Sentiment is evaluated using natural language processing (NLP) techniques. Brandwatch’s NLP algorithm is among the industry’s more conservative, aiming to qualify sentiment only when a certain confidence level is breached.
Brand selection
The report analyzed 200 brands in total. The 200 brands were selected through two processes. First, we examined revenue and output lists, industry literature, and social data to compile a list, then we cross-referenced with well-known brand ranks like the Fortune 500, the Interbrand Best Global Brands, and the Social Outlook Report.