

Top Brands Favored Much Higher Among One Political Party or the Other - credo
http://adage.com/article?article_id=146663

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patio11
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.)

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lionheart
Wait. What does sushi mean?

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patio11
<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.)

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alanh
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.")

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patio11
See, that is tribalism talking: they're evil, fish are good, of course they
won't like fish.

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

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Towle_
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.

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

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Scott_MacGregor
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.

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gdl
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).

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haidut
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.

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mkramlich
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.

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pavel_lishin
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.

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gojomo
Fox News should start a search engine!

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

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fleitz
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.

