Cowboys branded their cattle in the old days of the Wild West, to mark their territory and protect what is theirs. But Americans have not grown less attached to their prized local brands.
A new analysis of more than 500 brands, analyzing nearly two million tweets posted by the brand’s devoted customers in the United States, has revealed the most loved local brand in each state.
The local favorites won, with Vermont sock maker Darn Tough Vermont earning a positivity rating of 92.6 percent, the highest ranking overall.
What is popular in the state where you live? And can you bear the mark yourself?
The map was created by financial services website OnDeck, which began by compiling a list of brands that originated from a specific US state.
OnDeck then began tracking the reach of brands on Twitter (meaning there’s a slim chance some beloved, but heavily out-of-line companies may have missed out on the analytics).
Armed with those nearly two million brand-related tweets as its data points, the company then ran sentiment analysis, using the Hugging Face API, on a sample of posts that tagged each brand’s official Twitter account.
According to their metrics, each state’s top official brand is the single locally-founded company with the highest percentage of ‘@’-tagged tweets determined to cast the brand in a positive light.
The one consistent feature across each of these favorite brands is how quirky and unexpected they were.
Few Americans associate pizza with the desert Southwest, but local favorites Pizza Inn in Texas and Peter Piper Pizza in Arizona earned the most liked scores in their states with 55.2 percent and 55.3 percent respectively.
If you really want the locals’ favorite Southwestern cuisine, then you’d have to head to Georgia in the Southeast: Atlanta-founded Moe’s Southwest Grill was found to be the most-loved foodie restaurant analyzed with 81.0 percent tweets positives.
South Dakotans can’t get enough of local electronic scoreboard maker Daktronics (56.9 percent), whose customers include the NFL and stadiums around the world.
The apparent state pride in the name must be part of Daktronics’ appeal because the Brookings, South Dakota-based company has few opportunities to showcase its product in the state.
As the New York Times explained, “The nearest major league ballpark is a four-hour drive from this city, which barely has enough residents to fill any of the arenas and stadiums where the high-tech screens are located.” .
Landlocked Tennessee’s favorite local brand is, naturally, MasterCraft Boat Company (62.1 percent), which has been selling thousands of luxury boats internationally each year for more than half a century.
Strangest of all, though, is Delaware, a state famous for its very popular and very lax incorporation laws. It hardly has a popular brand.
Delaware’s highest-rated local brand, telecommunications giant Verizon, had more negative Tweets (53.3 percent) than positive (20.2 percent).
