Technology Industry Brands Report 2018 Q2

Intro

The technology industry is, by definition, always on the move. With so many great tech brands innovating in different spheres and in different ways, hardly a month goes by without consumers being confronted with newfangled ways to make their lives easier with tech.

The high-ticket nature of tech products—and the fact that most consumers have now gotten used to spending big on a gadget—means that it’s a particularly lucrative market. People are willing to spend a lot, time and time again to keep up-to-date with the latest thing on the market.

And the gadgets we all feel we need only seem to increase. The common phone and laptop have now been joined by wireless headphones, home assistants, and mobile payment apps.

But as the tech industry infiltrates more and more of our daily lives, the possibility of reticence and rejection is rising. Especially when it comes to the way brands use data.

The scandal over Cambridge Analytica’s underhand harvesting of Facebook data brought the whole technology industry to attention. Brands were keen to prove they were trustworthy—Facebook above all—and to retain consumer buy-in.

The introduction of GDPR across the EU also brought digital data to the forefront of people’s minds. And there’s been the growing sense in recent months of mistrust in people’s attitudes towards the tech that is so ingrained in their lives.

If the tech industry is to maintain the high NPS and Purchase Intent scores it enjoyed in Q1, it’s going to have to prove to the public that we can feel safe having devices in our workplaces, our homes, and the palms of our hands.

In May, Google announced their hopes to improve our “digital wellbeing.” Ironically, they want to do this by keeping us off our phones. The global tech giant has unveiled the changes its introduced to its products: a dashboard that tells you how often you’re using your phone, for instance.

If the tech brands themselves are vocalising the increasingly documented fact that, often, technology is bad for our mental health, then clearly the tech industry is becoming increasingly aware of consumer scepticism.

There’s a minefield to negotiate ahead for tech brands, but if they can pull it off, there is much to be gained. After all, the must-have gadget of the moment is constantly evolving, so brands who can get ahead of the curve stand to reap the rewards.

Let’s take a look at which brands are losing their grip on consumer interest and which are on the rise in this exciting marketplace.

Recall

Notably, the total number of brands named has fallen significantly. Whereas 72 brands were named in Q1, this time around only 54 brands made it to the top of consumers’ minds. It’s a sizeable difference, and one that is potentially indicative of the strength of the market leaders: the Apples and the Samsungs of the world are so dominant that it’s increasingly difficult for smaller brands to stand out and be remembered.

At the top of the pile, our top table has widened from nine to ten, with one new brand joining the upper echelons of the technology industry. IBM managed to win 1.1% of unprompted brand recall, particularly impressive for a B2B tech company who don’t focus nearly as heavily on branding. The rest of the top ten were all firmly B2C demonstrating that hardware is still all-important when it comes to winning consumer share-of-mind.

The leader of this industry is conclusive: Apple managed to increase their lead (which was considerable enough in Q1) from 57.5% to 58.7%. With such a firm hold on the industry, consumers are unlikely to sway from Apple anytime soon, and they have an excellent base upon which to build even higher levels of brand awareness.

Samsung, too, has retained its spot. Although it comes in at second place, its recall has dipped two percentage points to 8.4%. It’s a great loss when you consider that their main competitor is Apple—who seem only to be increasing in power.

Third and fourth place have swapped directly: Microsoft is now in third place (up from 2.5% to 6.4%) and Sony is now in fourth (down from 6.6% to 3.2%). Google and LG have held their positions as fifth and sixth respectively, while Amazon has increased its share of recall from 0.9% to 1.4%.

It’s an indication that Jeff Bezos’s continued efforts to reposition the brand as an implementer of cutting-edge technology, is working. This increase in traction for Amazon in terms of its place in the tech market is probably also a direct result of increased brand exposure in people’s homes via their healthy sales of Alexa devices (and possibly it’s high-profile acquisition of Whole Foods).

Amazon is reminding us that it’s pushing hard to become a tech company on the brink of the next greatest innovation. In April they acquired Ring—a video doorbell company—to ensure they’ll be able to compete with Google’s Nest division.

Since the two are already competing in the arena of home assistants (Alexa and Google Assistant have both continued to perform well), it makes sense that they would be investing in technology to revolutionise the home in other ways.

Purchase Intent

The lead in purchase Intent, unlike recall, has changed hands. Whereas Apple reigned supreme across this metric in Q1, they’ve been usurped by Amazon.

Again, this may well be attributed to Amazon’s concerted effort to be considered as a big player in the world of tech hardware. Their foothold was already established with their Kindle and tablet range, but with Alexa it has been cemented. It’s the gadget of the moment and, clearly, people are largely intending to purchase with Amazon.

Apple’s Purchase Intent—and, in fact, Purchase Intent across the board—is impressive (71.38%). Even at the bottom of our top table, with Panasonic, it only drops to 36.4%.

HP and Panasonic saw their performances slip, while Samsung, Sony, Microsoft, Google, LG improved their Purchase Intent score since last quarter.

On the whole, then, consumers seem to be feeling optimistic about technology. In an industry that’s constantly on the move, this is particularly important. Companies need consumers to buy into their latest upgrades and products to keep them upgrading, excited and ultimately buying more.

Net Promoter Score

Again, Amazon has succeeded in stripping Apple of their crown. They scored an excellent 64.3%, 2 percentage points above Apple, and 7 above Sony, who were the next highest scorers in 2nd and 3rd place.

Surprisingly HP have fallen drastically from their spot in 2nd place, all the way to the bottom of our top table. Their previous score of 54.6% is long gone, and a negative NPS—the only one of the table—takes its place.

The only newcomer to the table, IBM, achieved a respectable score of 27.3% which indicates relatively secure foundations if they want to build on their brand image amongst the public, as well as just tech insiders.

Similarly, LG scored a solid 46.7% (up from 23.1% in Q1). In recent months we’ve seen the run-up to the launch of both their new phone, the G7 ThinQ, and their newest foray into up-to-the-minute graphics, their Cinebeam 4K projector. With technology like this in the pipeline, consumers are clearly satisfied that the brand is innovating and evolving to deliver the best possible user experience.

Key Attributes

What are consumers’ main priorities and perceptions when considering technology brands? The word cloud below shows the qualities consumers most associate with their named technology brand.

Just like in our first brand index, the most sought-after quality for technology is its capacity to innovate.

Consumers want their tech up-to-the-minute and market-leading. This is partly because technology evolves so quickly that, if you don’t have the latest hardware, much of the software we need to communicate, work, and collaborate will run into issues.

When people spend so much on their personal technology—we see this in the appearance of “expensive—”it makes sense that they want the brand they’re buying from to be the most forward-thinking and inventive.

There’s also a strong sense that it must be “reliable”, and of good “quality.” When we’re so dependent on technology to let us pay for our shopping, call a cab, get our work done, or even in the future, open our houses, we need to be able to count on it working.

Technology brand leaders

The overall leaders of our first Technology Brand Index were as follows:

You can see how this looks plotted as both Total Brand Equity (TBE) and against the matrix of ‘well known and well liked.’

Takeaways

While Apple is still clearly running the show—down to its extraordinarily dominant percentage of unprompted recall—it’s not winning as conclusively as it was in Q1.

In fact it’s Amazon who managed to score the highest Purchase Intent and NPS, a sign that their consistent push to be viewed as a tech company, is definitely working.

It’s no small feat for IBM to have made it into our top ten brands, and is a sign that there is indeed room for B2B businesses to compete for consumer awareness.

That said, the table is predominantly filled with consumer tech companies, and even amongst this, producers of hardware continue to perform best.

The importance of the Echo devices as a visible part of people’s homes should not be underestimated as a factor in Amazon’s strong performance. The prevalence of phones is the most notable (Apple, Sony, Samsung, LG, Google and HP all make phones) as well as computers and laptops. There are also brands famous for their televisions (Panasonic, LG and Sony).

When technology is this tied up with the tangible, its seems brands would do well to keep their hand in the emerging markets within hardware. Snapchat, for example, are relaunching their “Spectacles” this week, presumably in an effort to do just this.

The absence of any social media brands (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram for example) is also significant: either people don’t trust them in this post-Cambridge Analytica era, or they are not doing the right things to win a share of consumers’ minds as “tech” brands.

Conclusions

The technology industry is generally very well-liked. It seems that most brands have withstood the Cambridge Analytica scandal with minimal damage to their ranking in consumers’ minds.

There are some giants when it comes to this industry, too, and most of these are makers of hardware. That said, the inclusion of IBM is a curveball, somewhat, and demonstrates that there is room, even in industries as rigid as this one for perception to alter.

If you see your brand’s name included in this report, and you’d like deeper, more targeted data on which aspects of your brand’s strategy need work, get in touch to find out more about how Attest can help.

And if your brand wasn’t featured, we can help you run a tailored brand equity matrix specific to your category or target consumer (e.g. just for software packages, or just for televisions).