The Weekly Senticent.com Sentiment Index Roundup for Supermarkets

It hasn’t been a great month for ASDA when it comes to Social Media Sentiment. Our tracker — which measures and compares the top three supermarkets against five key contexts of Cleanliness, Fresh Food, Inventory, Price & Offers, and Service — has seen a stark contrast between how social networkers were talking about ASDA in March, April and May and the negative sentiment that was regularly expressed over the course of June.

To bring some perspective to the rankings, in the last week alone, every single day saw more positive than negative sentiment on the social networks for Sainsburys. For Tesco, there was only two days where the needle just edged into negative territory, but for ASDA we saw four days out of the seven with significantly more negative comments than positive.

So where has ASDA’s malaise come from? What is the root cause of all this negative sentiment being expressed, and what are the calls to action that ASDA should derive? Taking our five contexts one-by-one could reveal some answers.

Cleanliness. Social Networkers rarely speak highly of cleanliness. It is one of the things that as shoppers we take for granted when it comes to big brand supermarkets, and it is also difficult to get super excited about a clean floor, or the lack of dust on shelves, so it is normal to expect that sentiment will always float under the surface. ASDA did okay here over the last week, and in particular the first half of the week, which is where they took some big hits on sentiment overall, so it seems there is little to worry about here.

Fresh Food. Looking at Fresh Food, the answer doesn’t seem to be there either. ASDA always performs lower than the other two supermarkets in this category as social networkers frequently complain about the quality of fruit and vegetables. This means that the dip we see in the second half of the week is actually a return to baseline rather than a dip, and the first half of the week is quite a good performance for ASDA, keeping up with Tesco and Sainsbury’s which would have served to leave the final rankings still undecided.

Inventory. It is the Inventory context where we start to see the shift from how social networkers perceived ASDA during Spring compared to these Summer months. Inventory covers not only stock levels, but also the catalogue and product range as a whole. ASDA was always the leader in this area, with tweets and facebook posts in the tens of thousands complimenting the retailer on a diverse range of products that had taken the fancy of shoppers nationwide. Now however, the chatter has fallen markedly silent, with only ASDA’s Free From and Low Protein ranges being talked about. But they seem to be a hit every single day and the praise has now become background noise. Meanwhile, Sainsbury’s was busy creating excitement with it Carrot Cakes, Chocolate, Pinot Grigio, and to add insult to injury, invading ASDA’s space with strong positive feedback on its Vegan range.

Inventory is one of the contexts that sees the highest volume of social media posts, so the impact of this one can have real influence on the overall rating. So... Call to Action 1: ASDA needs to create some excitement and newness around its product range, customers are getting bored!

Price & Offers. Price & Offers is another volatile and high volume context in which ASDA has typically fared very well, capitalising on its everyday low price branding. However, over the last few years, Aldi and Lidl have steadily undermined that branding, which means that social networkers are a lot less forgiving when it comes to bad price points and offers at ASDA. Furthermore, some good work by Sainsbury’s to maintain its premium quality image, but structure its pricing and promotions to match the centre of the market, means that shoppers consistently have their expectations exceeded in this context. All of this means that where earlier in the year, ASDA enjoyed a good level of daylight between it’s positive sentiment, and the fairly indifferent response from shoppers to Tesco and Sainsbury’s, we now see that on the whole, that differentiation is gone. Call to Action 2: After decades of a very clear pricing message, ASDA needs to regain that clarity with customers.

Service. It is the last of our contexts — Service — that really demonstrates the shift over the last four to five months. The old world order was that Tesco would deliver dire service that nobody had a good word to say about. Sainsbury’s would generally be good but then deliver at least a couple of bloopers per week of such catastrophic proportions, they would be pushed down the rankings, and ASDA would quietly but confidently sidestep the negative sentiment to come out top. As this is another high volume context, that was often enough to get ASDA the top sport in our rankings week-on-week.

Now though, Sainsbury’s and Tesco have upped their game. Whilst Sainsbury’s still has the odd blip (two this week), they are no longer the cataclysmic fails that go viral. Meanwhile Tesco is getting continuous praise for its community engagement, charity work and service in general. A vast improvement since the beginning of the year, and it has clearly listened to feedback. Call to Action 3: ASDA needs to do more to delight its customers with positive service. The only good news story in the last seven days was a free cup of tea for NHS Staff to mark the service’s 70th birthday, but this was too little too late after long wait times, click & collect failures, and process confusion took their toll on social networkers’ sentiment.

In conclusion, ASDA’s path to reclaim the top spot in our rankings is one of retail fundamentals. Better product, better price, better service. The fact that all three have slipped in recent months is why ASDA now find themselves at the bottom of the rankings for the sixth week running.