Associated British Foods (ABF) … which of its brands first spring to mind? Your list should include Twinings, Kingsmill, Silver Spoon, RYVITA, and Primark. These are all part of this international retail giant. We decided to look into the social conversation surrounding ABF by running a stream for the parent group only to see how it fared on social.
Over the past 31 days ABF racked up a total of 2,369 mentions with three very obvious spikes. On 25 February there was a peak of 443. Many of these were retweets of an article highlighting the company’s outstanding performance during recent months. This was primarily driven by Primark’s exceptionally good sales figures.
The second peak of 412 comments came on 7 March and included several mentions about analysts downgrading the ABF group. Sam Robson from The Motley Fool explained: “Shares in Associated British Foods dropped off today as the market opened, as Evolution Securities downgraded the company to an “underperform” rating.”
The final peak of 469 was on 19 March and the spike in mentions was in part driven by tweeted links to an infographic produced by charity ActionAid criticising ABF’s tax payments in Zambia.
Looking at the topic cloud, you can see that Primark was the most associated brand in relation to the parent group, as well as the most dominant topic. As previously mentioned, these comments were driven by a success in sales which led to expectation-beating half-year results. Oxfam was in second place with mentions being driven by criticism regarding its recent research on ABF’s ethical approaches.
The research carried out by Oxfam ranked food and beverage companies on the basis of their social and environmental policies. ABF was ranked as the worst in the survey of the ten global food companies. Actionaid linked the findings of the Oxfam study to its own research on Zambia.
However, ABF was quick to respond, dismissing Oxfam’s allegations as ‘ridiculous’. Its response was widely retweeted:
Although there are negative comments by UK charities, it’s interesting to see that the sentiment breakdown as a whole shows very few negative mentions in comparison with the positive comments. Those mentions with a negative sentiment only accounted for a fraction of the total at 4.56% whilst 33.9% of mentions were positive.
These are just a few of the key insights a quick analysis of ABF has shown. There were some real positives in the social media conversation. For example, the buzz around news that bouyant sales at Primark which boosted ABF’s half-year results. However, there were also potential threats to the brand’s reputation such as critical comments questioning the brand’s ethical approaches, and tax policy in Zambia. Reputation management is key and it is important to monitor what is being said about your brand on social. This can easily be achieved by engaging with a social media monitoring tool.