The Top Companies Reputation Index (TRCI) is based on interviews with 1 612 consumers and 100 representatives of business, with a wide spread covered in each group; age, race and location in the case of consumers and the size of companies for business representatives.
One part of each interview included specific questions about specific companies, but room was found in the average 35-minute sessions for more open-ended questions. Among other things, this formula allowed the research to uncover which brands both consumers and businesses spontaneously cite as having either good or bad reputations, regardless of their level of advertising spend.
The large consumer group was not exactly representative of the demographics of the country, which would tend to a more rural audience less likely to interact with the 30 target companies. Half were female, just under half were black, 21% were white, and 18% coloured.
More than half of the respondents were aged between 20 and 34 years, and the vast majority fell in the LSM 5 to 8 band, which indicates consumers with a living standards measure that makes them people who would typically spend money on telecommunications or in retail stores, rather than eking out an existence on the breadline or dispatching hired help to deal with the retailers.
Just over half were working full-time, 11% were unemployed and a small number were retired or house- wives, with the remainder made up of students, self-employed or part- time employed individuals. Roughly a quarter held some tertiary degree or diploma, and another 43% had completed high school.
Breaking down responses by gender and race provides some interesting insights into how different groups perceive different companies. Gender was never a major factor for any company in any category; men and women either perceived companies to have equally good or equally bad reputations.
When they were asked to name companies with bad reputations, people from different race groups also tended to react in much the same way. The two notable exceptions were Shoprite Holdings and Cell C.
In Shoprite Holdings’ case, 26% of coloured people thought the company had a bad reputation while only 2% of Indians agreed. Thirteen percent of black respondents and 14% of white respondents thought so.
Cell C was considered to not have a good reputation by 11% of white people, but not a single Indian respondent agreed. Indian respondents, like- wise, never immediately mentioned the SABC or Standard Bank as companies with bad reputations, even though both made it into the top 15 based on the responses of people from other race groups.
When it comes to naming companies with good reputations, on the other hand, big gaps between race groups emerge. Around 40% of both coloured and white respondents named Pick n Pay as a company with a good reputation, but only 27% of Indians thought so, and only 21% of black people. Around a quarter of respondents in other race groups named MTN, but the number of white people who did the same was less than half that.
Telkom was named as a company with a good reputation twice as often by black people as by any other racial group. Spar SA was much more likely to come up as a company with a good reputation among Indians than other groups, but Indians were far less likely to name Coca-Cola or SABMiller.
In fact, the only company that received a positive spontaneous mention from nearly equal numbers of people across different race groups was Standard Bank, with only four percentage points of variance.