Emirates tops the 2019 YouGov Brand Advocacy Rankings in the UAE
The UAE’s flag carrier airline has the strongest brand advocacy among consumers in the UAE
Emirates has emerged as the UAE’s most recommended brand for the second consecutive year and is ahead of Emaar and Almarai, who are placed in second and third this year as well.
The UAE Advocacy Rankings, produced by YouGov’s daily brand tracking tool BrandIndex, considered how much current and former customers endorsed brands over the past year by asking respondents, "Would you recommend the brand to a friend or colleague?" or “Would you tell a friend or colleague to avoid the brand?”.
Emirates NBD witnessed the greatest movement within the top 10 list and has climbed up four places to fifth in the 2019 rankings. Carrefour made a re-entry into the list at sixth after falling out of the rankings last year while Singapore Airlines made a fresh entry into the rankings in eighth.
Technology brands seem to have had a rather flat year in the UAE. iPhone and WhatsApp remain in the same spot- fourth and seventh, respectively. While, iPhone’s parent brand Apple has seen the largest decline among the top ten brands, moving down five places to tenth in the 2019 rankings. Internet search giant Google has also declined, moving down three places to ninth this year.
YouGov also revealed the brands that have the most improved level of customer advocacy over the past 12 months. Pakistan International Airlines has, for the second year in a row, seen the biggest improvement in its Recommend score, increasing from 19.1 points last year to 37.2 this year.
Content giant Netflix and Chinese handset manufacturer- Huawei have recorded significant improvement year on year and have become the second and third best improvers of 2019, with a change in score of 12.4 and 10.0, respectively.
Other than these, this year’s improvers list sees a mix of beverage brands such as Pepsi (change in score of 8.7) and Coca-Cola (7.6), and online brands such as Airbnb (8.2), Anghami (7.6) and noon.com (7.1). Air France (9.0) and Crest (7.3) are the remaining brands that complete the list of the top 10 improvers of 2019.
Methodology
YouGov BrandIndex screened all of its 590 brands in the UAE for their net Recommend score, which asks respondents "Would you recommend the brand to a friend or colleague?" and “Would you tell a friend or colleague to avoid the brand?” Only respondents who are current or former customers of a given brand are considered. Rankings data was collected between November 1, 2018 and October 31, 2019 and Improvers data was collected between November 1, 2017 and October 31, 2019. All brands must have a minimum N of 200 and have been tracked for at least 6 months to be included in the rankings and at least 6 months in the prior year's period (as well as being currently tracked) to be included among improvers.