Click to enlarge the charts below. (I apologize for lazily copying them from Excel.) I hope they are mostly self-explanatory, but if not, it might help to read on...
Some observations:
Few people feel neutral about Facebook, and most respondents dislike it. Only Mark Zuckerberg, who has a severe likeability problem, can claim a higher percentage of dislikes. Fortunately for Zuckerberg, he still has time to save face -- 19% of respondents don’t know anything about him.
Mark Zuckerberg (-.77) is sort of the inverse Bill Gates (+.79), although Bill Gates might have been similarly unlikeable in the early days of Microsoft domination.
Twitter and Apple are similarly likeable and similarly polarizing, and so are Steve Jobs and Obama.
I would have guessed that Obama would be the most polarizing, but Apple, Facebook, and Wal-Mart all have him beat. Even Twitter is as polarizing as Obama.
Google, Wikipedia, and Amazon are nearly uniformly loved.
I was quite surprised at Google’s likeability – I thought no way it would beat Wikipedia. (I am curious, by the way, why one person strongly dislikes Wikipedia.)
Respondents had widely varying likeability levels, with average scores ranging from -0.77 (Zuckerberg-level) to +1.22 (Amazon-level).
The Q Score is a measurement of the familiarity and appeal of a brand commonly used by MBA-type marketing folks. It is measured simply as (# of people who say X is 'one of my favorites') / (# of people who know what X is), so the higher the Q Score, the more highly-regarded the item or person is among the group that is familiar with them. By this measure, Google and Wikipedia's brands are doing phenomenally well, and Wal-Mart, Microsoft, and Zukerberg's brands are in trouble.
There are some interesting correlations (some spurious, no doubt).
- While people who like Bill Gates tend to like Microsoft, and while people who like Steve Jobs tend to like Apple, there is not much of a correlation with Zuckerberg and Facebook.
- Funny to see that while most correlations are positive, most correlations with Obama tend to be negative, implying that Obama fans tend to be anti-business (although not strongly).
- There is a strong correlation between Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg and between Steve Jobs and Bill Gates, but not so much between Bill Gates and Mark Zuckerberg.
- Not much of a correlation between Apple and Microsoft (.17), between Microsoft and Google (-.02), between Google and Facebook (.02) or between Twitter and Facebook (.11). However, there is a fairly strong correlation between Facebook and Microsoft (.44). (Not good news for either company, I’d say.)
- Strangely, the strongest correlation with Obama is Wikipedia, and it’s a negative one (-.33). There is also a strong-ish negative correlation between Wikipedia and Microsoft (-.35).
