Dirty Lemon, Glossier and Taco Bell are ranked as the three most culturally relevant consumer brands effectively building online communities by Zyper, a peer-to-peer marketing platform.
The software company’s rankings of the Top 40 brands building online communities is known as the Zyper Community Index 2020. The full results will be revealed at the World Economic Forum’s annual meeting in Davos, Switzerland this week.
Rounding out the top 10 are Hims, Cheetos, League of Legends, Allbirds, Peloton, Palace of Skateboards and Bumble. Yellow Tail, Oreo, Supreme, Lidl, Budweiser, Brandy Melville, Draper James, Milk, Starbucks and Xbox make up the top 20, in that order.
“All the sponsored content that’s being generated by influencers is boring consumers to distraction, and they’re looking instead to the niche communities they’re part of to learn about products and engage with brands they love,” said Amber Atherton, founder and CEO of Zyper, in a statement.
The company’s aim was to gauge consumer sentiment toward brands over time. To determine the rankings, Zyper researched 250 global consumer brands to identify which were most adept at building brand communities, relying on a range of metrics beyond followers and likes.
Zyper said it used both qualitative and quantitative data when assessing the “most culturally influential and noise-making brands from the consumer landscape.”
The process began with a pool of companies on the Fortune 1,000 list and Google Trends search results, which Zyper’s team of data scientists narrowed down to 250 brands. The company then looked at official brand pages across social media channels such as Instagram, YouTube, Reddit and Twitter.
After narrowing the focus to Instagram, the team analyzed which brands led in engagement from January 2019 to December 2019. While the analysis factored in each of the companies’ volume of followers, it was not the lead metric.
The data team weighed likes, fan actions and comments; positive sentiment toward the brand and product expressed in engagement; number of followers; and growth in both instances of discussion and appearances in web searches.