Top Brands Favored Much Higher Among One Political Party or the Other | Hacker News Reader

Top Brands Favored Much Higher Among One Political Party or the Other

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12 pointscredo18 comments

Much of political alignment is about status signaling and lifestyle choice. Ditto brands. You would expect to see overlap.

Relatedly, you can predict someone's vote in the last election very accurately by asking whether they have consumed sushi in the last 14 days. (This works less well in my kitchen.)

Wait. What does sushi mean?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sushi

A particular style of Japanese or Japanese-inspired food which has become famous in America. In America, sushi consumption is a ridiculously effective proxy for political liberalism. A landslide victory in the presidential election in the United States splits the country 53:47. The split among people answering "yes" to "Have you eaten sushi in the last 14 days?" is closer to 85-15.

Neither of the major political parties in the United States has any ideological commitment for or against sushi, but the coincidence that people in one tribe eat it and the ones in the other do not makes it a good example of political tribalism. Incidentally, since politics is a signaling mechanism, I have had people (on both sides of the aisle) profess to be surprised at my political leanings due to the perceived mismatch between them and my non-political preferences. (I love sushi.)

I always assumed it's because liking sushi as a typical European-American means going outside your traditional comfort zone and recognizing othe ethnicities may have something different you can nevertheless agree with. This is totally the opposite of two Republican trends: conservatism (rejection of change bey default) and racism (I said trend, and it's true. I'm an Arizonan and McCain ads run: "Keep those murderous Mexicans out! I'm McCain.")

See, that is tribalism talking: they're evil, fish are good, of course they won't like fish.

Oh yeah, I also assume GOP members hate chocolate and puppies. (I don't think I said what you think I said.)

Wow. That's pretty interesting actually.

Doesn't work 100% though. My girlfriend is completely obsessed with sushi, but she's hard-core Republican.

However, she is socially liberal. So who knows. I'm pretty apolitical as well.

This article would be a lot more interesting/revealing if it were what the submitter claims it to be (that's not a jab, just a sheepish admission of disappointment).

We have here the top ten brands for either political affiliation. Notably, some appear on both sides. While it's perhaps interesting that those brands do so well on either side, it would be far more interesting to know which brands are supported almost entirely by one side or the other. For example, say Dodge trucks have 90% Republican supporters and 10% Democrat. If that's the case, I want to know about it.

Edit: Sushi's a better example, and not just because mine was fictitious.

Notice (as first comment points out) that the #10 conservative brand is trusted more (by conservatives) than the #2 liberal brand.

With such a good service as Google, with all of their products/offerings, you would think if this study is in fact accurate (?) that Google would go after the other approximately 50% of the market. From a dollars and cents viewpoint it would seem like a good business move.

Going heads up against Bing without such a large portion of the market seems like unnecessarily making life harder for yourself. A high-quality service like Google offers is useful to everyone, and seems like a neutral moneymaker to me.

This is a measure of "perception", not necessarily usage. Their FAQ contains some information about what exactly that means:

http://www.brandindex.com/content/faqs.asp

There's nothing here that suggests to me that Google is weak in the republican market; all it shows is that they are not in the top ten favored brands for that side. No other Internet companies are listed on the republicans' side either, so we don't have enough data here to draw any useful conclusions about how Google stacks up against their competition (unless Google is worried about losing customers to Fox News and Cheerios).

I think the equally important message, albeit not as shocking, is that 7 of the top 10 brands are shared between both political lines. This is not a small number. In other words, intensity of sentiment aside, there is not much fundamental difference in brand perception in regards to political allegiance.

Google for Democrats and Fox News for Republicans. I wonder if those rank highly with their respective demographics as their leading source for "facts". Would help explain some of the polling differences that keep coming up, like, for example, belief in whether Obama is a Muslim, etc.

Of course UPS and Fedex perform well for both groups. Aside from DHL and USPS, they don't have any other significant competition, and I think most people trust UPS/Fedex over the USPS any day of the week.

Fox News should start a search engine!

I'm a little surprised Apple isn't on there.

In the greater context of available political stances I think that Democrats and Republicans are actually very similar, but you'll find great disagreement between the constituents similar to what you'd find between people who are big fans of both Coke and Pepsi, and how they'd insist that they don't taste anything like each other.

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