Plugged in.

Audience response to online media coverage about the move to electric cars.

What’s driving audience response?

• We love our cars, but we know the days of combustion engines are numbered.
• In February 2020 the UK government announced that the ban on sales of diesel and petrol engines would be brought forward to 2035. Even hybrids will no longer be environmentally acceptable, so all new cars will need to run on electricity or hydrogen.
• This follows years of confusion about which cars we should be buying to do our bit for the environment. Which aspects of the current government stance are consumers most concerned about?
• In this report, Tribe provides a range of insights that will put policy makers and motor manufacturers in the shoes of their customers, helping them understand consumer perceptions of what’s hindering a smooth transition to cleaner vehicles.
• Our innovative and cost-effective research techniques allow decision- makers to get to the crux of what really matters to consumers, by:
  • Analysing how they behave in response to news about key issues.
  • Understanding which information they seek when forming opinions.
  • Discovering which online media are most likely to engage their attention.
  • Exploring their perceptions about change and its real impact on their everyday lives.

Insights focused on the audience.
PRSV.

• While many communicators focus on the channels they are using and the message content, audience impact is at the heart of Tribe’s approach to understanding what shapes opinions and influences behaviour change.
• Using PRSV evaluation, we reveal how people respond to online media coverage by looking for information about topics that interest them.
• The PRSV algorithm calculates the probability that the audience has seen, opened and actually read PR-generated content. We call this the engaged audience.
• The news content that appears in Google search results is the basis for our analysis. Online media are now the most influential channel. as people turn to Google first for information.
• To prove the validity of PRSV results, we correlate them against independent data sets, such as consumer search trends, website visits or sales. This allows us to illustrate the impact of PR on real-world audience behaviour.

Which issues are people actually reading about?