Record fine hurts SSE brand in eyes of consumers, and causes Twitter furore
Earlier this week energy provider SSE was fined £10.5m by Ofgem for mis-selling gas and electricity. The regulator said the company, formerly known as Scottish and Southern Energy, was guilty of “prolonged and extensive" mis-selling.
Using a combination of YouGov’s daily brand monitoring tool, BrandIndex, and social media analysis tool, SoMA, we can see the immediate impact the fine had on the SSE brand.
SSE’s Buzz score (which measures whether people have heard something positive or negative about the brand), took a nose dive in the wake of the negative news coverage, going from -10 on 2 April to -28.9 on 4 April.
The news also spread like wildfire on Twitter. On the day prior to the fine, just 0.03% of the UK Twitter population heard about SSE, rising to a staggering 41.4% on 3 April.
The most popular words mentioned alongside SSE on Twitter were ’10.5m’, ‘Ofgem’, and ‘fined’.
