Home Grown Brands Dominate UAE’s First Annual Consumer Advocacy Rankings

Home grown UAE brands have dominated YouGov BrandIndex’s first UAE Brand Advocacy rankings, which ranks brands that receive the highest recommendations from their own customers.

From a pool of more than 410 major brands, the top 10 brands with the highest consumer recommendation levels were led by Emirates Airline at number one, followed by Emaar at number three. Etihad Airways in sixth place and Emirates NBD in tenth position.

Even across a broad range of sectors, UAE based companies captured the highest recommendation levels from their customers, with the Travel sector coming out on top, followed by Real Estate and Finance. UAE brands defeated top global tech and retail brands.

“Home grown businesses in the UAE have become global leaders of world class standards of quality and service, we can see this is true as their customers are consistently loyal and would happily recommend UAE brands to friends and family” says YouGov MENA General Manager Kailash Nagdev.

The top 10 Advocacy brand rankings are rounded out with iPhone (2), Whatsapp (4), Apple (5), Carrefour (7), Google (8) and Samsung (9).

All 410+ brands in the YouGov BrandIndex brand universe were measured with the company’s Recommend score, which asks respondents, "Would you recommend the brand to a friend?" Scores were filtered for adults 18 and over who are customers of the brand they were recommending.

A Recommend score can range from -100 to 100 with a zero score equaling a neutral position.

The BrandIndex Brand Advocacy Scores are calculated by measuring Recommend Scores among each brand’s customers for the twelve-month period through October 2016. Recommend scores for the brands are measured by asking, "Would you recommend the brand to a friend or family member, or would you recommend that a friend or family member avoid the brand?" scores are calculated by subtracting the negative ‎responses from the positive responses.

YouGov will also be releasing the 2016 Annual Brandindex Rankings this coming January. The Brandindex rankings are based on brand Buzz scores which are calculated by asking respondents if they have heard anything positive or negative about a brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news, word-of-mouth or friends and family. The annual rankings show which businesses have had highest buzz scores throughout 2016.

YouGov BrandIndex (www.brandindex.com) interviews 150 people each day from a representative UAE population sample, Respondents are drawn from an online panel of more than 728,500 individuals.