OK this post comes after a two week hiatus- and somewhat deliberately so- last 30 days were the holiday and annual leave clearing days for most people. Less traffic overall on the web. No point singing on a stage when there are no listeners right?

Alongside, been busy putting together some stuff – ask me and I’ll tell you what it is. That took a whole lot of time. But promise- from now onwards- a volley of posts coming your way. Shit! Chinese New Year coming up- one more week of traffic dip from Singapore and South East Asia. Never mind. Life goes on.

So if you’ve seen the first part of this post, I had decided to give a ‘different’ perspective on choosing a gadget on “likeability” by the public. There are rational and comparison/reviews all over the web- but this post covers preferences at the emotional/perceptual level.

A summary here- in case you are feeling lazy to click or hard pressed for time (deciding on hong baos and what restaurants to choose for reunions) or have 990 tabs open in your browser already:

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There will be three parts to this post about likeable laptops for Small Medium Businesses:

• The first post sets a base- on the brands and models in my consideration set. I give out some links to you to see the models yourself, in case you want to take a look. I evaluated two ends of the spectrum that could be used by a small business owner or a business executive to make a decision- both with different priorities

• The second post will evaluate the perception around these brands- what do people think of when it comes to these computer brands- and hence what do they think of you when you are seen with these brands. The analysis will go beyond the technical and cost-benefit aspects- which are aplenty.
• And then maybe, if need be, seal it with a third post summarizing the above

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It seems a third post might not be necessary. But without much further ado- let me come to the second part. Evaluating the perception of these laptop brands- using perception of public. Some of the readers, like Su Min (You smart gurl… you)- had suggested me to use a tool- and incidentally that is exactly what I had in mind as well.

So Yes- It is a tool-Leveraging on the wisdom of crowds- called BrandTags;. Now by now, you might have known I’m like- a tool junkie. I love good, innovative and useful tools, specially web based. Actually anything new and innovative cacthes my attention. And I do try to promote the tool/concept/people/company is as much micro capacity as I can.

Here it is:

Brand Tags: A collective experiment in brand perception. All tags are generated by people like you.

What this does is that it asks people one simple question- What do you think of first when you see this brand name?

The results are a string/ word cloud of terms that people think of. As you can imagine, some words are more popular and some others are much limited to a limited few’s imagination. If you plot them on a graph, should get something like a big head long tail type plot.

Huge in numbers- so will concentrate on the big head of perceptual analysis of people towards the brand:

Before we start- here is what I did- I took the top 30 attributes/words- and categorized them into positive, negative and neutral

HP:

printer    printers computer computers    print    crap    pc    laptop    invent    hp    boring    old    ink   cheap    hewlett packard    reliable    quality    blue    broken    shit    technology    carly    calculator   sucks    compaq    expensive    paper    corporate    printing    solid

Interestingly, for this brand, looking at the size of the words, people seem to be divided almost equally between exclusive attributes like cheap and expensive. Now you could argue that cheap has different meanings and a product can be cheap as well expensive together, but we will leave it at that. I have used cheap as a positive attribute. You may differ, but I’d prefer the cheaper branded notebook (ceteris paribus) for sure.

Final Score for HP:

• 18 neutral: 60% (defining product attributes- like computer)
• 7 negative : 23.3%
• 5 positives: 16.7%

• Positives in top 10 by size: 1
• Negatives in top 10 by size: 1

Dell:

computer    computers    cheap    pc    crap    dude    laptop    boring    hell    shit    dull    old    dell    broken    junk    laptops    expensive    reliable    notebook    michael    india    quality    sucks    bad service    cheap computers    custom    corporate    crappy    lame    online

Final score for Dell:

• 12 neutral: 40% (classified “dude” and “online” and “india”as neutral. Whew!)
• 13 negative: 43.3% !
• 5 positive: (I have chosen “quality” and “custom” as positive attributes

• Positives in top 10 by size: 1
• Negatives in top 10 by size:4

Lenovo:

This was funny in a way! Most people mentioned words like “what?” “Huh?” “Who?”- signifying that the brand still has to cut it in western countries- seems olympics brought them some association. And IBM still figures as the top thing when people think of Lenovo.

ibm    ?    computer    laptop    china    chinese    cheap    thinkpad    nothing    computers    crap    boring    notebook    no idea    pc    blue    what?    huh?    huh    laptops    lenovo    who?    business    new    what    tech    foreign    olympics    never heard of it    think pad

Final score for Lenovo:

• 13 neutral: 50% (I included “foreign” and “china” in this)
• 11 negative:36.7%
• 6 positive: 20% (included “new” and “cheap”)

• Positives in top 10 by size: 1
• Negatives in top 10 by size: 2

Samsung and Sony:

The perception of Samsung and Sony are too much of consumer electronics (TV/DVD etc) to make any reasonable conclusions. Leaving them out of here

Apple:

Ah! This would be cool to analyze- specially after my observation in the previous post. So here it goes:

Just like Dell, the bigger words intensity is quite high, but overwhelmingly positive attribution:

apple    mac    cool    ipod    design    computer    awesome    innovative    computers    innovation    expensive    creative    love    trendy    sleek    clean    steve jobs    white    quality    overpriced    pretentious    hip    simple    style    bite    best    iphone    cult    gay    apple computers

Final score for Apple:

• 10 neutral: 33.3% (Is “bite” -”positive”? OR “negative”? I marked “neutral” Ditto for ipod and iphone)
• 4 negative: 13.3% (Is “gay” negative? Sorry but I assumed in this context, it wasn’t flattering either)
• 16 positive:53.3% (Woah! What happened here? )

• Positives in top 10 by size:5 clear ones (cool, design, awesome, innovative, innovation!)
• Negatives in top 10 by size:0 (Thats Zero- nil-nada-zilch!)

Acer:

computer    cheap    computers    laptop    pc    ?    crap    laptops    notebook    taiwan    nothing    cheap computer    old    cheap computers    monitor    technology    huh?    boring    fast    no idea    what?    bandage    good    shit    acer    shoes    tennis    bad    ace    what

Final score for Acer:

• 9 neutral:30%
• 15 negative: 50% (I included any npn computer association as negative- people think of tennis and shoes- not exactly the brand space you’d like to be in when you sell computers)
• 6 positive: 20%

• Positives in top 10 by size:1 (Cheap)
• Negatives in top 10 by size:2

So there it is. You could do more- but this gets you an idea. There are people selling perception reports for over US 10k- so for free- this one’s not so bad :p

Net result is that Apple wins the perception game. HP has the maximum Neutral perception and Acer seems to have the maximum negative scoring.

Actually I think- this tool, along with a similar tool that could give an indicator of average Net Promoter Scores for these brands- used together could give a very nice insight into the likability of these brands. Could not find a similar tool for NPS though.

Notes (obviosuly you know these points, but for protocol sake):

• This is an ever changing word cloud- and the information here is over a few days of observation. But things change over time.
• This will not have a representative Asian persepctive- I am sure Asian representation is pretty less.
• The negatives, postives and neutrals are my assessment. No scientific evidence that when people mention “corporate” – they mean it in positive or negative context. Is cheap positive or negative? I took as positive.
• Again, the tool just enlarges the words- but does not tell the number of people that have mentioned these attributes. So the percentages are skewed. However, in some cases, the mentions were overwhelmingly high and in those cases, the scoring would work

thumbnail: http://www.flickr.com/photos/bekathwia/2414194397/sizes/s/