I have been getting ready for Christmas since September and making quite a few of my friends envious of my organisational skills, I’ve even been ticking gifts off my shopping list since then. When I began thinking about Christmas 2015, I started tracking online social media conversations using Synthesio’s Social Intelligence platform, and one of the things I really look forward to at Christmas time in London is the variety of Christmassy sandwiches that appear on our shelves to bring a bit of turkey and cranberry joy to what is often a mostly grey lunch time! Therefore, I have been looking into people’s opinions about this year’s festive sandwiches online and I’m excited to share what I’ve found.
As expected, there are a lot of people who feel strongly about who makes the best Christmas sandwich with many articles ranking UK supermarkets offerings. A number of people have been expressing their emotions on Instagram and Twitter about the 2015 Christmas sandwich saga where Twitter saw 75% of all online media conversations.
Using Boolean queries that searched for emotive keywords, and also automated sentiment analysis within the Synthesio platform, we can see a greater volume of conversation about how people disliked Tesco and Waitrose sandwiches compared with other brands. This contrasted with how people expressed strong positivity for Eat and Pret sandwiches.
This year, Pret developed a countdown campaign for the arrival of their festive menu. On the day of launch (10th November) we saw a spike of positive conversation where people declared excitement about getting their hands on Pret’s festive sandwiches. Here we can see the volume timeline for Pret conversation:
However, we saw a larger volume spike on one day for Tesco’s controversial flavour sandwich: chocolate and cherry on cinnamon flavour bread, than for Pret’s menu launch earlier in the month.
Using Synthesio’s ROI metric “Awareness,” we can see that on the day that Pret’s festive menu launched, the conversations mentioning the brand returned a “potential impression” on 10.8 million people. Comparing this with Tesco on the day that their unconventional sandwich was seen on the shelves, there were 25.2 million potential impressions – nearly 2.5 times more people. This larger number of impressions for Tesco’s sandwich was likely attributed to the location of conversations in the online sphere, where there were a higher number of mentions in online news sites about the chocolate and cherry sandwich.
Also as part of the investigation, we conducted a taste test of our own on a variety of Christmas sandwiches in the Synthesio London office (I know, it’s hard work but we were brave enough to eat all of these delicious sandwiches just so that we could give you the information).
Using Synthesio’s automated sentiment analysis on all online mentions, I compared the percentage of positive mentions with the feedback from our taste test. We agreed that our favourites were Eat’s Full Works Festive Bloomer and Pret’s Christmas Lunch.
I do have to say though, after all of these turkey sandwiches, I now really do want to try that chocolate one! So what do you think? What’s your favourite Christmas sandwich?
