UK consumers are more likely to put trust in British brands, according to the latest industry survey from customer experience specialist Nunwood, with Amazon the only non-UK company in the top 10 best brands.
The survey, which looked at the 100 most popular brands for UK consumers, saw John Lewis claim the top spot ahead of retailer QVC and bank First Direct, with Amazon – who claimed top spot this time last year – shunted down to fourth.
Marks & Spencer took up two places in the top 10, with its Simply Food stores (6th) ranking ahead of its larger department stores (9th).
Other supermarkets featured strongly, with Waitrose (10th), Sainsbury’s (11th), Asda (17th) and Iceland (19th) all making the top 20. Tesco, by contrast, placed a lowly 47th, although that score was up 11 places from 2012.
The biggest climber in the survey was Butlin’s, which rose more than 150 places to claim 14th spot, only behind Virgin Atlantic (5th) in the best travel and tourism brand. This comes amidst the Butlins owners investing millions developing more upmarket apartments to rid it of its previous ‘cheap and cheerful’ image.
Another high scorer was Premier Inn at 26, which makes sense given a recent survey by Which? put the budget hotel chain as the third best in the UK for customer satisfaction, only marginally behind the more expensive Q Hotels and Radisson Blu Edwardian.
For non-UK brands, Apple and Emirates placed joint 15th – with the former rising three places and the latter 21 – with Krispy Kreme (=57), Subway (=57) and Ikea (60) all placing lower down.
David Conway, analyst at Nunwood, said there was an “aura” around John Lewis. “The fact that it is owned by its employees has given it a halo effect,” he said.
John Lewis recently came out on top as the best high street brand in a RadiumOne study of social media compatibility, even though it had 3.5m fewer social followers than rival store Top Shop.
And even though Apple didn’t make the top 10 of this study, the Cupertino firm was in September voted the most valuable global brand according to Interbrand, replacing Coca-Cola, which had held the title for the previous 13 years.
Yet it’s clear to see there’s still plenty of pride in great British brands among UK consumers. What do you make of the survey?
