Love/Hate brand scores

Just for fun, I started typing in "I hate (brand)" in Google to see what comes up. I then got curious about the findings for "I love (brand)." Here's the love/hate score for a random selection of brands. While I was at it, I did a "passion buzz  index" against the average number of comments for these brands (positive or negative). Microsoft, Walmart, Comcast and McDonalds  are the big losers on the Love/Hate score. No surprise. (And yes, this is the random stuff I do when I'm procrastinating.)

Brand	Hate	Love	L/H Score	Buzz Index
Linux	3860	34,000	8.8	358.8
Google	1170	22900	19.6	233.2
Microsoft	16600	5990	0.4	214.1
Apple	696	16100	23.1	159.2
McDonalds	3540	2730	0.8	59.4
Yahoo	2800	2950	1.1	54.4
Target	438	4950	11.3	51.1
Walmart	4850	534	0.1	51
Dell	2410	2240	0.9	44.1
Ikea	469	3350	7.1	36.2
Comcast	1800	318	0.2	20.1
Starbucks	861	878	1.0	16.5

Big thanks to Christopher for helping me get this info into a table format!

Comments

[Lara Honeycutt]

Thanks for the branding update - I'm ranting about the Comcast "hate". The monopoly on the market place has us at their mercy, I'm actually contemplating "dish" as an alternative.... Comcast-f'ing-tastic has driven me to watch television on my computer in a Starbucks, all of which begs - what would we do if there was an actual choice, would we even be smart enough to choose another option.

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[Kevin]

Hi friends. Try typing cars brands. For example Mescedes, Audi, BMW. And don't forget using google databases in foreing countries too. (us. uk. ru.)
P.S. Try I love/hate George Bush. No surprise.

[Mike]

I love Google =)

[Mahlon]

BlogPulse lets you see the results of search strings over time, based on blog postings. I gave three examples of how Google brand strength has fluctuated over the last six months. It's amazing to see on a time series how the love-hate buzz index spikes when new products are introduced. I found it useful to use both "hate X" and "X sucks" to get meaningful results.

[Kevin Fox]

I was surprised not to see TiVo on the list, till I ran the numbers myself. "I hate/love TiVo" has a pretty low buzz score... until you change the query to "I hate/love my TiVo" at which point it's one of the highest love ratios and has ample buzz to make the chart.

[Douglas]

Flickr has 429 loves to 8 hates. Technorati shows 99 loves for Linux to 34 hates. iPod had 1,130 loves and 246 hates. iMac had 2,170 loves and 57 hates. Technorati has 55 loves and 0 hates. Technorati has 7 loves and 0 hates on Technorati. It would be neat to do this kind of thing on well-known blogs.

[Brenda]

I love Firefox! And I love antiques like I write about in my blog!

[Frank Hecker]

I've blogged about this at my site in reference to Firefox and other Mozilla-related products. It turns out that Firefox has extremely high L/H Score and Buzz Index, much higher than Google, Apple, Linux, etc. Based on my computations Firefox has an L/H Score of 209, almost ten times Google's score of 23 in my survey (or Apple's high score of 23 in Rice's), and a Buzz Index of 509, about 50% higher than Google's score of 313 in my survey (or Linux's score of 359 in Rice's).

Note that I recomputed Rice's results because I thought she wasn't using quotes, as implied above; I was wrong about this, but in any case recomputing gave me a better understanding of the methodology and was a useful check on her results.

Final note: "I love Firefox" results have jumped from 73K yesterday when I made my comment and post, to 93K today. I don't know if Google reindexing happened to uncover a new chuck of references, or whether there's something else going on that would skew the Firefox results.

[Brian Carter]

Very cool. I LOVE WHEN people use numbers to quantify this crazy organic mess called internet. Dovetailing with the last Jennifer comment above, I would add another column that adds the number of comments, so you have a sort of "reaction magnitude" or "visibility" number- because, in a way, being hated might be better than be unknown. ;-)

[Frank Hecker]

When I applied this to Firefox (using "I love/hate Firefox" in quotes, as previously recommended), I get 72,800 "loves" and 348 "hates", for a L/H score of 209. (By comparison, the score for Linux is 32,700/539 or 61 using the same methodology.)

Under the original methodology (not using quotes) the Firefox score is 2,060,000/581,000 or 3.5. However once you get beyond the first few pages of results this is due to the phenomenon noted by the previous poster of the words occuring in unrelated contexts.

I really think you should redo the entire table using the more correct methodology. In any case it's clear that people are passionate about their love of Firefox :-)

[jennifer rice]

Buzz index compares the total # of comments for the brand (positive and negative) to the average # of comments for these 13 brands. Very unscientific, I know, but I like the idea behind it. So that means that Linux generates 3x the number of comments than the average (of these brands).
For a more accurate score (as if this methodology could ever be accurate,) it would be better to index against a LOT more brands.

[David Foster]

I get the L/H ratio, but I don't understand how you calculated the passion score...

[Bruce DeBoer]

Now you have me curious about how your results relate to their Brand Equity calculations.

If you were the COE of the companies listed, wouldn't you be concerned if your HATE numbers were equal or higher than your LOVE numbers?

[Mark J]

You should probably search for those things in "quotes," as omitting them will return results that have "microsoft" and "hate" on the same page. It could say "I love Microsoft, and I hate Apple," but it would return as a result for "I hate microsoft" if you forget the quotes.

Also, I'm guessing you've not heard of Googlefight. Very very fun. It's been redone with great Flash graphics. Someone did an "evil meter" based on which company got a higher score for "[company] kills puppies"

[Piers Fawkes]

Google is OK, but I think a Technorati score is a far more up to the minute indicater of public opinion. Only counts blogs/ejournals in the last 7 days.

Check and compare the scores we got on Apple & Microsoft in last month's PSFK article 'Anti-Apple. Has the worm turned?' (Click on my name or copy and paste the URL below)
http://www.psfk.com/2005/01/antiapple_the_w.html

[Effern]

Also, to get those spaces out of your post (top sentence, gap, table), remove the "nbsp"'s from your table code.

Let me know if you need more of an explanation.

Thanks!

[Effern]

Post hoc ergo propter hoc. :-)

Explanation here.

But yeah, what Jevon said.

[Jevon]

Hah! I love it! It feels so accurate.

[Diego from metacool]

What a cool survey!

I'd love to see you express these results in terms of the Net Promoter metric, assuming the "love" websites are promoters, and the "hate" websites are detractors.

[Christopher Carfi]

heh. try "i love realnetworks"