This year’s respondents answered questions about brand touchpoints within specific industries and brands as well as their perceptions on their employee experience, including:

• Their perceptions of experiences and communications within 25 industry categories they experience in daily life
• How familiar they are with certain brands
• If they recently used these brands
• The simplicity/complexity of a brand’s communications and interactions in relation to their industry peers
• Their willingness to pay more for brands they currently use if they provided simpler experiences
• The simplicity/complexity of their employers and workplaces

Brand Simplicity Score

Respondents in each country rated more than 100 brands (with respondents the US and UK also ranking more than 40 disruptive companies). Siegel+Gale researchers used input from past surveys, In-country offices and existing third-party research to select a representative set of brands that in-country respondents would be most likely to use or experience. We are unable to report on smaller, lesser-known brands for which we could not collect sufficient responses.

The score was calculated with the following inputs:

• How each brand was rated on the simplicity/complexity of its products, services, interactions and communications in relation to its industry peers. User/Non-user ratings were weighted to give more importance to the user experience and remove any possible bias for higher proportions of users for some of the brands
• How consistently the brand experience and communications were rated across respondents (the standard deviation of the ratings)
• How aligned non-user and user perceptions were, privileging aligned perceptions (the difference between user and non-user ratings)
• The Simplicity Score for the brand's industry or category(ies)

Industry Simplicity Score

Each country rated the following industries: Appliances, Automotive, Banks/Retail, Electronics, Fitness, General Insurance, Health Insurance, Internet/Search, Internet/ Retail, Media, Restaurants, Retail/Fashion, Retail/General, Retail/Grocery, Retail/Health and beauty, Shipping/Mail, Social media, Telecom/Cable, Telecom/Cell phone, Travel/Air, Travel/Booking, Travel/Car rental, Travel/Hotels, Travel/Train and Utilities.

The Industry score was calculated with the following inputs:

• The industry's contribution to making life simpler or more complex
• The pain of typical interactions with companies/organizations within the industry
• How the industry's typical communications rank in terms of:
  • — Ease of understanding
  • — Transparency/Honesty
  • — Communicating that customer needs are being cared for/Making the customer feel valued and appreciated
  • — Innovation/Freshness
  • — Usefulness