David Barnett's Brand Protection Articles: Michelin most prominent and best sentiment tyre brand in 2024

by Chris Anthony and David Barnett

In 2005, Tyres & Accessories published the first in what would become a 12-year series of online brand prominence and sentiment analyses relating to the best-known tyre brands. That research was conducted in association with Envisional and latterly NetNames. Now, one of the brains behind the original data has developed "a new and improved methodology for quantifying brand prominence and sentiment"^[1]. Here, David Barnett, now Brand Protection Strategist at intangible asset management specialists Stobbs, presents the results of a new study looking at the online prominence and sentiment of tyre brands.

The latest research looks at a set of 150 tyre brands drawn from various sources, including Tyres & Accessories' list of leading tyre companies^[2] and Brand Finance's list of most valuable tyre brands^[3,4]. The research also incorporates all brands considered in the previous NetNames/Envisional studies. The methodology involves the use of a series of generic tyre-related search queries to bring back a list of pages for analysis, resulting in a dataset of 4,318 distinct webpage URLs. Findings are based on searches and analysis carried out between 8 and 9 January 2024, utilising results returned on the first page of Google.com, browsing from a UK-based IP address.

Overall, Michelin achieves the position of being both the most prominent and the most positively-referenced brand. It is also striking that seven of the top 10 most prominent brands appear in Brand Finance's list of the top 15 most valuable tyre brands. Additionally, the top five most positively referenced brands all appear in Brand Finance's top six. Broadly, there is a moderate positive correlation between brand value and both online prominence (correlation coefficient = +0.67) and online sentiment (correlation = +0.79) - see Figures 3 and 4.

Figure 1: While the full Stobbs research ranks 150 brands, this figure shows the brands with the highest prominence scores (Source: Stobbs)

Overall it was generally good news for tyre brands. However, nine of the analysed brands achieved sentiment scores which were negative, of which the bottom three were Titan (-3.52), Venezia (-1.84) and Interstate (-1.39). However, in all cases, these scores result from what appear to be non-relevant references to the brand names on a small number of pages. Essentially, the low prominences (prominence scores of 0.011, 0.001 and 0.025, respectively) of these brands (that is the small number of pages on which references appear) mean that the sentiment scores can be 'skewed' by a small number of references.

Figure 2: The brands with the highest positive sentiment scores (i.e. the most favourably-referenced brands) (Source: Stobbs)

In addition, a quick glance at the unfiltered data reveals a surprising find - Komoran in what would have been second place after Michelin. Of course, Komoran is a Michelin group brand. However, there is no way that Komoran receives the same level of attention and marketing investment as Group Michelin's eponymous flag brand. In this study, the high ranking of Kormoran (which is positioned as a budget brand and currently offered by a number of UK suppliers) - achieving second place in the unfiltered prominence rankings, and 12th in the sentiment rankings - was something of an anomaly. That anomaly largely results from the fact that one of the search queries used (for "performance tyres") returned a set of approximately 30 distinct, but very similar, webpages. Those websites specifically shared URLs in the format [site].co.uk/tyre/details/kormoran/road-performance and featured extensive references to Kormoran products, when the searches were carried out. If all but one of these pages is removed from the calculations in each case, the prominence score for the Kormoran brand drops to 0.194 (10th place in the rankings), and the sentiment score drops to 2.74 (56th place). As a result, since Komoran's scores had been inflated, the values were recalculated by removing all but one of these pages from the analysis in each case.

Figure 3: Online prominence score compared with brand value, for the top 10 most valuable brands (Source: Stobbs; Brand Finance)

Figure 4: Online brand sentiment score compared with brand value, for the top 10 most valuable brands (Source: Stobbs; Brand Finance)

It is also informative to compare the performances of the surveyed tyre brands with those from the previous NetNames/Envisional studies (for those brands which were included in these earlier analyses). For comparisons of prominence, the scores from the earlier studies were renormalised (scaled), so that the mean score across all brands featured in the most recent study (from 2017) was the same as that for the same group of brands from the current (2024) study. The resulting trends over time in the relative prominences of the set of brands analysed previously is shown in Figure 5.

And the result is that, almost seven years since the last research of its kind, Michelin retains the top spot it has consistently held in all previous studies, and the previous 'big six' (Michelin, Goodyear, Continental, Pirelli, Bridgestone, Dunlop) remain largely unchanged. However, the news that Falken has overtaken Dunlop in terms of online prominence, is one departure from business as usual. However, that race remains very close with Dunlop and Falken achieving prominence scores of 0.49 and 0.50, respectively.

Similarly, we can also compare the relative sentiment rankings of the set of 18 brands which have been considered in some or all of the previous studies (see Figure 6).

Here, all 18 of these brands continue to receive positive sentiment scores overall (ranging from +2.08 for Uniroyal to +27.66 for Michelin), indicating that commentary is generally favourable overall for this set of brands. In terms of degree of positive sentiment, Michelin regains the top position it held in 2016, and every year between 2007 and 2014. As with the measure of prominence, the top six brands within this group remain generally unchanged. However, the most noticeable difference once again relates to Dunlop (+11.48), which actually drops below Nexen (rising 7 places; +15.68) and Falken (+16.07).

Outside the top eight of the group, significant increases in ranking were seen for Toyo (up 3 places in the ranking), Hankook (up 3) and Maxxis (up 4), and decreases for Kumho (down 5), Avon (down 7) and Yokohama (down 4).