PayPal has very high brand awareness in the UK but have had some difficulties conveying their proposition in full.

Apparently existing users are aware that PayPal is a safer, quicker way to pay online, but their understanding of the full service offering is often limited. Customers often don’t know that they can fund their account by bank account, credit or debit card, or the huge number of sites where PayPal is accepted.

Consumers, particularly new users, think PayPal can only be used to purchase items on eBay. They are unaware that they can use PayPal as a payment method on hundreds of websites including large high street retail sites (e.g., Nikestore, Boots, Topshop, Halfords, Interflora, Toys R Us, JD sports, etc). Consumers also have many different, and often incorrect, perceptions of PayPal – e.g. it is an online bank account, you can only use it if you have balance or you have to top it up to use it, etc… They are unaware that they can pay with their choice of payment methods and no top up of funds is required.

So in a nutshell, PayPal wanted us to find out more about this – what the customers general perceptions are – and if they understand what PayPal does.

Brand assciated with the issues

The question raised was how the public reacted to the issues raised and specifically how the Malvern brand had been associated with them. Firstly and most importantly these issues had been a talking point by a lot of consumers and generated a lot of various negative buzz around the subject. We took each question in the brief and queried the data derived from online sentiment. These are the issues raised that we undertook deeper analysis in:

Bottled water is immoral/morally unacceptable/morally indefensible
Since the initial search term mentioned the word ‘immoral’, we have more comments with the word ‘immoral’ in it than anything else. This is worth noting when deciding on what to search for. Here are some of the questions we looked at answering:

Higher CO2 emissions
Searching the data for “CO2” and “greenhouse” yielded many comments so it is clearly one of the major issues relating to bottled water.

Lots of packaging
Results such as, “it’s the real issue is that it’s completely crazy to be transporting water and packaging all over the place - sometimes from the other side of the world - when we’ve got good quality stuff available from the tap.”

Other issues explored:
Plastic bottles need disposal
A billion people globally don’t have safe water

Is Malvern associated with any/all of these issues?
Best way to answer this question is to do a keyword search on the processed information. We found there was only one comment referencing Malvern, which is interesting because it suggests that people are more likely to opt for the cheapest water available than for a specific brand. The comment also suggests that people with negative opinions about bottled water tar all brands with the same brush, in this case Evian and Malvern, two brands that perhaps are most familiar to them.

Do any other brands stand out in being associated with these issues?
Searching for keyword counts of the major brands yielded results for Evian, Volvic and Malvern.

Brand Assciated with the issues
Evian is mentioned far and above any other brand and this is an example of where we need to delve deeper into the data and reasons.

Key insight

Basic metric sentiment

Basic metric sentiment
Generally we found a very positive response towards the campaign with 50-60% of buzz being positive. Then we saw more ‘positive’ than ‘neutral’ of about 30-40%. With not an insignificant ‘negative’ response of 10-15%.

Key insight
Social media outlets:

• ad industry and marketing 30-40%
• design industry 20-25%
• general interest 15-20%
• car industry 15-20%
• car interest 15-20%

Typically the spread is skewed towards industry based blogs and forums (ad industry and marketing) and then a more even spread that includes design industry, general interest (including Twitter), car industry and car interest.

Geographical spread
What we see in terms of geographical spread is that the blog chatter is predominantly UK based. We also observed sentiment in France, Spain, Germany, and Italy reflecting the campaign airing in Western Europe, and to a lesser extent Russia and also USA. 

Key influencers
No evidence of significant key influencers emerging, but single blogs generating more than 5 responses are ad industry and marketing based blogs.

Buzz Flavour (what is being said and in what context
Patterns & repeated messages. Analysis of the positive responses reveals a clear emerging pattern. The predominant theme is the high regard for it’s clever simplicity, as well as its quirkiness. Words that are repeatedly used throughout our positive responses are ‘simplicity’, ‘cool’, ‘clever’, ‘beautiful’, ‘quirky’, ‘impressive’, ‘subtle’, ‘awesome’, and the phrases ‘very cool’,  ‘clever and simple’, ‘cool simplicity’, ‘quirky and simple’, ‘less is more’.

Discussion was equally likely to be around the music track as well as the animation. Reaction to the music is polarised, eliciting either a nostalgic reverence to the choice of Woody Guthrie ‘beautiful’, ‘nostalgic’, ‘love the song’, or a very definite dislike to the track ‘irritating’, ‘hate the song’, ‘excruciating’. A definite theme is ‘great video, hate the song’.

To a lesser extent [than the animation and music] consumers commented on the titles.  ‘We’ve Unboxed the Box’ is almost uniformly regarded as ‘clever’.
We see a similar ‘simplicity’ theme emerging in our analysis of negative responses. However, the context is now a derogatory one where simplistic is regarded as cheap. The repeated words include ‘simplistic’, ‘awful’, ‘cheap’, and the phrases ‘simplistic and cheap’, ‘looks cheap’, ‘doesn’t look real’, ‘looks CG’. Another recurring negative theme is the unflattering comparison of the Audi to a cardboard box, and questions arising behind the motivation to use a cardboard box in an ad “How flattering can notion ‘made from cardboard’ be?”, “It basically says ‘our car is made from cardboard’!”.

Are messages being discussed alongside other key messages/brands?
Although not to any significant degree we can see some discussion that includes Volvo. In this context the comparison can be regarded as negative and unflattering. ‘Surely this advert for the new Audi Q5 is actually for an awfully boxy Volvo?’, ‘Surely a Volvo advert if ever I’ve seen one’.