â–¶ Perceptions Matter—Auto Industry’s Rep Goes Up, Airlines Lose Altitude: A public perception study by Harris Poll that asks the public how it perceives 22 of the nation’s largest industries shows big changes since 2009, when the survey was last conducted. Those changes include a huge jump in the number of people who think that the automobile industry is doing a good job of serving consumers, and a big decrease in the public popularity of the airline industry. Findings include:
• The auto industry showed a 36 point improvement, from +6 in 2009 to +42 in 2011, while airlines suffered a 27 point decline, from +34 to +7 for airlines.
• The industries with the best images among the public are supermarkets (+80), online search engines (+74), hospitals (+66), computer hardware companies (+61) and computer software companies (+55).
• The least popular industries are oil companies (-31), tobacco companies (-21), managed care companies (-13), health insurance companies (-9) and investment and brokerage firms (+3).
Source: Harris Poll
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| On July 12, 2011, Netflix announced service and price changes that caused outrage among its customers—and 59% negative sentiment on Twitter. The company would lose about a million customers and see its stock slide because of it. Then, on Sept. 19, Netflix CEO Reed Hastings publicly said, “I screwed up.” Note that negative sentiment slid to 38% in September, but there was only a 1% uptick on positive posts. PeopleBrowsr sampled 10,000 posts on the topic for each period. Source: PeopleBrowsr (www.peoplebrowsr.com), exclusive to PR News |
â–¶ Public Down on the Fourth Estate: Negative opinions about news organizations now equal or surpass the all-time highs the Pew Research Center has been tracking since 1985, says an updated July 2011 study. Highlights include:
• 66% say news stories often are inaccurate; 77% think that news orgs tend to favor one side; and 80% say news is often influenced by powerful people and organizations (got that, PR pros?).
• Just 25% say that news orgs get the facts straight while 66% say stories are often inaccurate. Four years ago, 39% said news organizations mostly get the facts straight and 53% said stories are often inaccurate. PRN
Source: Pew Research Center