The beauty of continuous daily data is that it allows for an instant assessment of how the public is reacting to advertising or events.
Over the last week we have seen three of the major banks – HSBC, Lloyds Banking Group and RBS – announce their annual results and we can already look at BrandIndex to see how the public has reacted.
Paying attention
The first thing to note is the attention score – this is the total number of people who have heard anything about a brand in the past two weeks, whether it be positive or negative.
Over the past week RBS and Lloyds’s attention have both doubled with approximately a third of the population talking about each of them. HSBC only announced its numbers on Monday but its attention score is also now starting to rise.
Lloyds flatlines
So how have recent announcements affected buzz scores (all positive mentions in attention minus any negative ones)? Following its £2.2bn profit announcement, Lloyds has maintained an essentially flatline score around the zero mark. i.e. a sixth of people are hearing positive things and a sixth of people negative things about them – so more people are hearing news, but the proportion hearing good versus bad remains the same.
RBS’s £3.6bn losses, however, have seen its buzz scores nosedive again. The -8 reading at the start of last week had fallen to -29 by Monday, indicating that nearly all news heard about RBS has been negative.
Although it is very early days for HSBC, it saw a minor bump in buzz on Monday (the day it announced) and over the next couple of days we will be able to start fully appreciating the impact for the bank.
Attention scores for HSBC, Lloyds and RBS
Buzz scores for HSBC, Lloyds and RBS
A version of this article also appears here in City AM