Retail chains and their followers

Bauer Zsófia
research specialist
Ynsight Research

 Ynsight Research and Silberstein & Partners set up a research team to study consumer opinion about FMCG retailers in social media and on the internet in general. They used the netnography method that not only counts the ‘likes’ but also sheds light on the motivations behind consumers’ emotions and opinions. There was plenty of data available for this, as in 2019 no fewer than 700,000 posts and comments were dealing with various brands; these generated 2.8 million likes, comments and shares.

Márk Mezei
communications expert
Silberstein & Partners

 We registered big differences in the number of followers of retail chains. In this respect Lidl, Spar and Tesco have the most popular pages. Auchan is in a special situation as it publishes Hungarian-language content online in Hungary, its follower base is international. Both CBA and Príma have their own pages, but we combined their data for the sake of this research. Having many followers doesn’t necessarily translate into high activity level, e.g. Coop’s followers are much more active than the average.

We prepared our ranking using sentiment analysis, so that not only the number of mentions show how popular a retailer is. The data reveals that in the case of Reál promotions campaigns and prize games made the retail chain popular. With Aldi, the focus is on high-quality products, while Lidl is about saving money. Both retailers showed themselves in a positive light with their efforts to go plastic-free in 2019, and with the good career opportunities that they offer.

Last year 144,419 individual users expressed their opinion about retail chains on more than 6,000 different platforms. It is noteworthy that much more women do so than men: 60.5 percent were women and 39.5 percent were men. Men were more active commenting on articles about public affairs and politics, while women liked to discuss environmental issues. It seems that 25-44 year old consumers made the most comments among those whose age was indicated.

Shoppers were the most active on Facebook by far. It is interesting that Hungarian users are also active in other countries with a considerable Hungarian population. After the Christmas period, there were two very important shopping-related topics discussed in the online space. Already at the end of the year users started talking about the level of inflation and how much FMCG product prices are likely to increase. There were more than 10,000 such comments and posts between 1 December 2019 and 15 January 2020. The other popular topic was buying Hungarian-made products. This discussion was generated by the plans to subsidise the operating of village grocery stores and to use little flags for marking the origin of pork in shops. //