At the start of last month the Focus DIY chain entered administration. BrandIndex data gives us a read on the problems that the brand has had for a long period.
When we compare it to its competitors (B&Q, Homebase and Wickes) we can see that Focus DIY was the least talked about, and when people did talk about it, it was less favourably. It were seen as poor quality and relatively poor value and had lower satisfaction levels – all in all, not a great recipe for success.
Reputation and perception
First looking at attention – over the course of 2010 and 2011 between 5-7% of the population had recently heard anything about Focus (either good or bad). This compares to Wickes (10-17%), Homebase (13-22%) and B&Q (19-33%). The leap for Focus (up to 19%) came after they announced their intention to go into administration – showing that the adage that 'all publicity is good publicity' really doesn’t hold true.
BrandIndex: Focus DIY 'Attention'
With such low attention, we’d expect Focus to perform less well on the standard score for perception measures – if people aren’t thinking of you, they can’t think good things of you. On BrandIndex, though, we can take this further and look at those scores proportionally (i.e. only taking into account those people who say something about the brand).
Even here Focus performs badly; as mentioned earlier, this poor performance is across all measures monitored by BrandIndex, so best summed up using the index score (a combined score from the six different measures). Focus had been hovering around the +20 to +30 level before plummeting on the news of administration, whereas its rivals have consistently had scores of +60 to +70. Our data shows: the writing had long been on the wall for Focus DIY.
BrandIndex: Focus DIY 'Attention'
