October 10th, 2019, Scott Booth
The smartphone giant is the most positively talked about brand amongst young adults in the country
iPhone tops the 2019 YouGov NextGen Rankings in the UAE, for the second consecutive year. In this day and age of fast-moving technology and tech-savvy youth, the smartphone brand is the most positively talked about brand amongst young adults in the UAE.
YouGov’s daily brand tracking tool, BrandIndex, considered the opinions of respondents aged between 18 and 34, collected online over the past year, to discover the 10 brands they’ve talked about the most positively with friends and family, whether in person, online or through social media.
Emirates jumped up two places to become second in the rankings while Apple remains in third this year as well. In a list dominated by digital brands, KFC has shown the greatest positive movement in the top 10 list, climbing up to fifth from eighth last year. On the other hand, WhatsApp has had the toughest year in the country and fell four places to tenth in this year’s rankings.
Apple’s competitor Samsung slipped down one place to sixth this year and Facebook slipped down two places to fourth. However, Samsung’s smartphone brand- Galaxy remains in the same place as last year- at seventh, and retail brand Carrefour moves up one place to eighth in the 2019 rankings. Emirates NBD made a re-entry at ninth, after falling out of the list last year.
The rankings also assess which brands have experienced the greatest uplift in positive Word of Mouth score over the past 12 months. It seems like global streaming giant Netflix has certainly harnessed the power of word of mouth and has become the top improver this year, increasing its Word of Mouth score by 10.9 points, from 57.5 last year to 68.4 this year. Talabat.com is the second best improver with a change in score of +7.9. Tide (+7.0) and Huawei (+6.9) are at third and fourth in the list of improvers.
Amazon.ae, which was previously tracked as Amazon.com, officially launched in the UAE in May 2019, replacing Souq.com and compared to the previous year’s scores for Amazon, we can see this development was very positively received by the young UAE adults. The brand created a lot of chatter and has changed its score from 52.2 to 57.7, landing it at fifth in the list of top ten improvers of this year.
Bottled drinking water brands- Nestle Pure Life (increasing by 5.1) and Al Ain (+4.8) are also part of the top ten improvers. Lux (+4.9), Silicon Oasis (+4.9) and California Garden (+4.9) are some of the other brands that make up the list of improvers of 2019.
Methodology
YouGov BrandIndex first screened all of its 586 brands for positive Buzz, which asks respondents "Have you heard anything positive about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news, or word of mouth?" Brands with low response volume were eliminated. Brands that were tracked for at least 6 months (top 10) and at least 18 months (top 10 improvers) were then ranked on Word of Mouth scores, which asks respondents "Which of the following brands have you talked about with friends and family in the past two weeks (whether in person, online, or through social media)?" All respondents for this research were young adults 18 through 34 years old. Data was collected between September 1, 2018, and August 31, 2019, for the top 10 brands and September 1, 2017, to August 31, 2019, for top 10 improvers.