This is the fifth in a series of articles about some of the findings from the 2011 Big Broadcast Survey (BBS), a global study of broadcast industry trends, technology purchasing plans and benchmarking of broadcast technology vendor brands. More than 8000 people in 100+ countries took part in the 2011 BBS, making it the largest and most comprehensive market study ever done in the broadcast industry.
In a previous article, we wrote about the 2011 BBS Overall Brand Opinion League Table, which shows how our global sample of broadcast professionals ranked 118 broadcast vendor brands in terms of their overall opinion of these vendors.
While it’s great for a vendor to be named to the top 30 for overall opinion, these rankings may be seen as somewhat one-sided because they rely primarily on the positive opinions of respondents. In order to get a better understanding of how broadcast technology vendor brands are perceived, it is necessary to look at both the positive and negative opinions of brands, and to take into account how these opinions have changed over time.
To achieve this, we first determine whether respondents have an opinion of a brand, and then ask them how their opinion of that brand has changed over time. For example, has it improved, declined or stayed the same?
When compared to the previously published ranking of overall opinions of brands, this methodology provides a more comprehensive picture of how a brand is perceived because it shows both the positive and negative opinions of each brand.
Sometimes these results highlight some interesting perceptions about brands. Take, for example, Figure 1, which is from our 2009 study.
In this case, the brand that was top for “got better” was also top for “got worse.”
Given these results, it is perhaps more useful to find the net change in overall opinion for each brand, which is calculated by using the following formula:
GB-GW/# of total respondents = net change in brand image
In other words, the percentage of respondents who said a brand “got worse” is subtracted from the percentage of respondents who said their opinion of a brand had “got better” (ignoring the “stayed the same” number).
In other words, the percentage of respondents who said a brand “got worse” is subtracted from the percentage of respondents who said their opinion of a brand had “got better” (ignoring the “stayed the same” number).
This takes into account both the positive and negative perceptions of brands, along with how these opinions have changed over time. It also presents a more balanced view of which brands are getting better and which are getting worse in the minds of market participants.
Because some brands are polarizing (as seen in the example above), it’s possible that a strong “got better” response might be cancelled out by a strong “got worse” response. As a result, some companies that were rated in the top 30 on just the “got better” score were not included in the global or regional top 30 because their high “got worse” score dragged down their overall result. At the same time, a few of the companies with high “got worse” scores still made the top 30 list because these negative scores were cancelled out by even higher “got better” scores.
In order to arrive at the net change in overall opinion, research participants were asked whether their opinion of various brands had “got better,” “got worse” or “stayed the same” over the past two to three years.
The results of this enquiry are shown below in two ways:
• An overall industry “league table” that shows the 30 highest ranked vendors for the metric “net change of overall opinion.” The data in this chart is broken out globally and regionally.
• An analysis of the “frequency” of appearance in the “net change of overall opinion” league table.
The top 30 ranked brands for net change of overall opinion are shown below for both the global sample of all respondents, as well as for all respondents in each of the geographic regions.
In all cases, these results are shown in alphabetical order — NOT in the order in which they were ranked by respondents to the study. (See Table 1.) A total of 51 broadcast technology vendor brands are included in this table, illustrating the geographic variation of opinion.
Click here to read the full article, including charts and analysis.