From Amazon to Ozempic, the brands Americans think are the best and worst

The price of everyday items is a big deal for Americans. Inflation helps shape consumers’ attitudes about how the economy is doing, and played a role in influencing the recent US election. That makes people’s feelings about how much the brands they buy are worth especially important for those companies.

Survey firm YouGov asked more than 19,000 Americans about their opinions of more than 2,000 major brands, including their value for the money, their quality, and whether they’d consider purchasing those brands.

The vast majority of those — 1,936 — received a positive score for both quality and value.

“I think that’s reflective of these very well-established brands that have got long heritages and have been in market a long time,” YouGov Head of Marketing, Americas, Reuben Staines told Sherwood News. “If they were failing on those two counts, they’d probably not survive.”

We charted a selection of these companies based on net quality and net value. The more positive a value, for example, the higher percentage of people there were who said the brand was a good value, rather than bad. The size of the circle represents what percentage of Americans would purchase them.

Generally, a brand would want to find themselves with a large circle in the top right quadrant, like Amazon. Some 80% of survey respondents consider purchasing from Amazon, and it enjoys a very high perception of value and quality.

However, there are some successful outliers.

Dollar Tree and Dollar General both have a reasonably high value and low quality — but that’s kinda what they’re going for. Amazon competitor Temu would probably hope for a better value ranking, even if its quality isn’t as important to customers.

Rolex isn’t considered a great value, but its quality isn’t in question. People consider Starbucks, and to a lesser extent Jaguar as well as Novo Nordisk’s Ozempic, to have reasonable quality but a bad value. That’s potentially sustainable since they, for some, offer products that are more of a luxury than a necessity

Then there are companies in or near the bottom left quadrant — a bad place to be.

That includes Spirit Airlines, which recently filed for bankruptcy. Ticketmaster and Tesla are both in dangerous territory, since their quality isn’t great and they’re considered a bad value for the price.