Tech brands dominate YouGov APAC’s Best Buzz Rankings 2020

The top ten most positively talked about brands across twelve APAC markets

Tech brands dominated YouGov APAC’s Best Buzz Rankings 2020, which looks at the top ten most positively talked about brands across twelve APAC markets.

YouGov BrandIndex measures the public’s perception of brands daily across a range of measures. The annual rankings are compiled using Buzz scores from across all 52 weeks of last year. Buzz scores measure whether people have heard anything good or bad about a brand during the previous two weeks.

With most of 2020 spent indoors or under lockdown, it is no surprise that seven of the top ten are digital brands. The frontrunner of this year’s list is Southeast Asian e-commerce platform Shopee, which also came in as the seventh healthiest brand in YouGov’s Best Global Brands 2020.

Second on the list is video-sharing platform. Apart from shopping from home, it is clear APAC respondents have also resorted to social media to keep themselves entertained. Other social media brands include instant-messaging platform WhatsApp in fourth, and Facebook in fifth.

South Korean electronics manufacturer Samsung comes in third and subscription video-on-demand service Netflix comes in seventh, and technology conglomerate Google in comes in eighth, rounding off the digital brands in this year’s top ten.

The remaining brands are no strangers to enjoying positive buzz. Fast-food chain McDonald’s comes in sixth, Japanese clothing retailer Uniqlo in ninth, and Japanese car manufacturer Toyota in tenth.

Methodology:

The brands in YouGov Best Buzz Rankings 2020 were ranked based on the Buzz score, which asks respondents, “If you've heard anything about the brand in the last two weeks, through advertising, news or word of mouth, was it positive or negative?” Scores are net scores, calculated by subtracting the percentage of negative responses from the percentage of positive responses for each brand.

The Buzz Rankings chart shows the brands with the highest average Buzz scores between January 1st and December 31st, 2020. The Buzz Improvers chart ranks the brands with the highest increase in Buzz comparing scores in years 2019 and 2020, to be included in the Buzz Improvers list, the variance must be positive. Scores are representative of the general population.

All Buzz scores listed have been rounded to a single decimal place; however, we have used additional precision to assign ranks.

All brands must be tracked for at least 6 months to be included in the rankings, and have been tracked for at least 6 months in the prior year’s period (as well as being currently tracked) to appear in the Improvers tables.

For this year’s Asia Pacific top ten list, YouGov used data from 12 markets – data from markets that cover three sectors or fewer were not counted in the top 10. The rankings use the Buzz score which assesses the buzz or net sentiment generated across all media (advertising, news and word of mouth).