Branding has always been territorial.
First, America’s cowboys branded their cattle to warn others to keep their hands off.
Then, industrial-era manufacturers slapped trademarks on their goods to let rival entrepreneurs know that however far their products traveled, the idea had a very definite owner. It also let consumers know that this was an asset worth protecting; the trademark is something between a stamp of origin and an artist’s signature.
Next, packaging and marketing materials built on this aura of distinction. Logos, slogans and narratives spread faster than the products themselves along the airwaves of the twentieth century’s communication revolution, carrying with them all that was romantic about their geographic source.
Today, brands have gotten into our heads. The name of a loved or hated brand alone is enough to conjure its aura, and many of us cultivate our personal identity through the brands we choose to buy. This includes a sense of place: loyalty to brands from the place we call home, or the evocation of exoticism through a label that evokes a particular place: one that’s wild, romantic, authentic, urban or plain cool.
So which brands from each part of the United States have we adopted as our favorites? OnDeck analyzed the way that Twitter users talk about brands from every state to see which ones get the most love.
What We Did
OnDeck first created a list of brands originating from every state. We then performed a sentiment analysis (using Hugging Face API) on a sample of tweets that tagged an official Twitter handle for each brand. The top brand in each state is the locally founded brand with the highest proportion of related tweets that are positive in sentiment.
Key Findings
- The most-loved consumer brand that we analyzed from the U.S. is Darn Tough Vermont, a sock manufacturer with a 92.6% positivity rating on Twitter.
- Moe’s Southwest Grill (81.0%) is the most loved food joint that we analyzed on Twitter — it was founded in Atlanta, Georgia.
- New York State’s most loved brand that we analyzed is Calvin Klein (64.3%).
- Delaware is the only state in the U.S. that has no love for its own consumer brands. Verizon, has the highest positivity rating of any brand in the state (20.2%), but negativity for the brand vastly outweighs it in Delaware (53.3%).
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Western States: Beer vs. Silicon
Four brands are tied on 73.4% each as the most popular brands from this region.
California’s Intel may be the best known of them. Do Twitter users really love that chip so much? Part of Intel’s secret is that we associate it with advancements and upgrades. A new computer has “Intel Inside,” but an old computer is a broken [insert cursed computer brand], and nobody blames the chip.
Plus, in transforming sand into raw computing power, Intel feels like an all-American success story: “Today, I saw the chip-making process first-hand at @intel’s Fab 42, where semiconductors are made, one of the most complex and important processes in modern technology and today’s economy happening right here,” tweets Governor Katie Hobbs — from over the border in Arizona…
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Alaska’s Midnight Sun Brewing Company is right up there with Intel. There may not be Midnight Sun inside every computer, but there’s Midnight Sun beer inside plenty of Americans in the seven states where it is sold. This geographic exclusivity — along with the craft that goes into brewing and branding the product — is part of what makes it feel luxurious.
A luxury that is also a beer? Of course Twitter users are positive about it.
Southwest: Pizza & Peanut Butter Froyo Inexplicably Popular
Arizona’s Peter Piper Pizza beats its rivals to the top as the most popular brand we analyzed in America’s southwest. The brand’s original 1973 restaurant remains open in Glendale, Arizona, today, but meanwhile, the company has branched out across other states and “into 10,000-square-foot “eatertainment” restaurants with a welcoming, contemporary design, state-of-the-art games, flat-screen televisions, free WiFi, plus beer and wine for adults.”
In other words, those geniuses have created a venue so likable that you’ll come away happy even if nobody turns up to your birthday party.
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Food is popular in this part of the country, with the remaining three states also offering eateries and a convenience store as their most loved brands.
What could be better than Reese’s Peanut Butter Sauce-flavored frozen yogurt (or your favorite niche flavor of choice)? Only the same, but bought in a self-serve store (no human interaction!) or delivered to your door. This is what Oklahoma City’s Orange Leaf Frozen Yogurt offers. It now has hundreds of branches across America, and aside from the occasional beef about coupons, nobody’s complaining.
Midwest: Food Brands Are Popular, Especially Among Dogs
America definitely has a warm spot for Midwest food and drink brands, with Chicago’s Grubhub joined by the more regionally-specific Omaha Steaks and St. Louis’, internationally-renowned Budweiser.
Even dogs have an opinion, with Hill’s Pet Nutrition in joint first place for the region. The company was established in 1907 in Topeka, Kansas. But the product was originally developed as a bespoke pet food for a German Shepherd named Buddy, whose kidneys didn’t agree with regular pet food. Hill’s has since been bought by Colgate-Palmolive but continues to deliver tasty, nutritious pet chow, as dogs would tell you if they were on Twitter, which they definitely aren’t.
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Akron City’s Acme Fresh Market remains an Ohio phenomenon, and its rather generic name stands in contrast to another regional favorite: Daktronics. The latter was founded in Brookings, South Dakota, in 1968, but its electronic scoreboards cover much of the NFL and can be found around the world.
The regional association that Daktronics’ name conjures may add to its ‘small town company made good’ profile. As the New York Times tells us, “the nearest big-league ballpark is a four-hour drive from this town [Brookings], which has barely enough residents to fill any of the arenas and stadiums where the high-tech screens are fixtures.”
Southeast: A Historic Department Store and Luxury on the High Seas
Food and drink brands rule the roost in southeastern states. Especially, Moe’s Southwest Grill which takes the top spot with an 81% popularity rating. However, a few other industries jostle for attention as well. These include Alabama’s family-owned department store, Gus Mayer, which is in second place for the region with a 73.4% popularity rating.
The brand has two stores: one in its original hometown of Birmingham (although not in its original premises) and a newer one at Green Hills in Nashville, Tennessee. The brand cultivates further goodwill toward its up-market brand by putting on swanky events and ‘essential’ sales.
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Elsewhere in the region, vehicle-adjacent brands are big hitters. Tennessee’s MasterCraft Boat Company has been around for over half a century, selling thousands of boats internationally each year and providing innovation within the luxury boat sector.
Twitter users thank MasterCraft for their “outstanding workmanship and service!!!” among general appreciation for the good life on the high seas.
Northeast: Darn Popular Sock Brand
Socks are a truly underrated ingredient in the recipe for happiness. Get them right, and everything else will fall into place. Darn Tough Vermont not only provides stylish, durable and comfortable socks, but the Northfield company will even replace them when they wear out.
Perhaps all that’s holding Darn Tough — America’s favorite brand — back from a 100% positivity rating is that they won’t replace a sock that’s been chewed by a dog, burned in a fire or lost in the laundry. But principles are important when it comes to branding!
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The northeast is also our capital of cool brands, with L.L.Bean (Maine) and Calvin Klein (New York) representing. Maryland’s PRS Guitars puts American rock and roll on the map. The manufacturer’s signature artists include Carlos Santana and John Mayer.
These are high-end guitars that look and sound good, so any complaints tend to be about the (understandably high) price. “This gear fascinates me by [its] beautiful finish and functional performance!!” says one satisfied axe master. “I cannot wait to be amplified in studios!!”
Brand Local, Go Global
Despite the global market that many of today’s companies enjoy (or aspire to), place of origin remains a vital part of a brand’s story. ‘Place’ is evocative; depending on how you angle it in your marketing, your location can push your brand’s aura in the direction you need it. Plus, when you’re starting out, a little hometown pride can help develop a loyal local following to establish your sales base and a cohort of digital brand ambassadors online.
After all, whatever it is your brand does, if you did it somewhere else… it would be something else.
METHODOLOGY & SOURCES
We kicked off our research by first curating a list of brands that originate from every state. This list only included brands that were founded in a state, not headquartered there. We then removed brands that were less consumer-facing (e.g., manufacturing, pharma, energy), focusing on brands that the general public would have sentiment toward.
We then sourced a Twitter handle for each brand left in our analysis. Official handles that were linked from a brand’s website were considered first, and brands with no Twitter presence at all were omitted from our research at this stage. We collected data on brands that have an official handle but are no longer active on the website (as customers still use them to mention the brand). We also found that some large corporations had multiple Twitter accounts for general updates and customer support. In these cases, we collected data from each handle.
To establish our dataset, we retrieved up to 4,000 tweets that tag a brand’s handle, setting a minimum threshold of 1,000 tweets per brand. In total, we analyzed over 550 of the most prominent brands across all states and approximately two million tweets.
The next step was sentiment analysis, running the tweets through HuggingFace API, which assigned positive, neutral or negative scores to each tweet. With the results of the HuggingFace sentiment analysis at hand, we could then isolate the brand in every state with the highest percent of positive tweets.
Our data was collected in March 2023.
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