Negative publicity doesn't hurt all brands equally. Research tracking daily survey data from YouGov Brand Index found that in mobile phones, negative news spikes were followed by increased purchase intent, unlike the Bud Light backlash. The effect depends on the product category and type of bad news.
there is this saying that any publicity is good publicity. Any media is good media. We've also seen pretty negative business performance. I think it was about a year ago, Bud Light had this thing where a large segment of the US, uh, became really mad at them because of some of their ad choices and actually lost the number one spot. You've done some research showing some negative publicity can actually be good on brand perception and business performance.
It's interesting that you related it to that particular scenario, cuz that might might be one where bad publicity is bad. Let me tell you what we did. It's one of the projects where I think the evidence we were able to bring was the weakest it could be. We were looking at survey data from YouGov Brand Index, a daily brand tracker where people answer questions like, which of the following brands are you aware of? They're presented with the category and click which ones they're aware of. We found this really funny thing in the mobile phone industry. When a brand has a bump in negative news, later they get a bump in purchase intent.
Was the negative news sort of common sense or was the negative news something that you saw in the brand index?
Something we saw in the brand index. We have no idea what it is. Someone said, show us another category. And so we did it for the car industry and we didn't find the effect. We're not really sure what's going on, but we think it has to do with what bad news is. We think in the mobile phone category, the kind of bad news you hear is stuff like, "I broke my phone." And in the car industry, the kind of bad news you hear is, "This car stranded me. I couldn't get to work." We actually see a negative effect of bad news in the car industry because it's just more important when something bad happens with your car. And also the news is worse.
