Some trends can be picked ahead of their time, however the explosiveness of a random tweet, call-to-action or cat video is almost impossible to pin-point.
While trends will mostly fade back and be replaced with another, the occasional and rare trend can have legitimate and measurable impacts on society. A recent example of this is the anti-plastic straw movement that took off in 2018.
It started with a terribly sad and visceral video of a straw being removed from the nose of a sea turtle – it’s likely you’ve seen it yourself. The internet is filled with images and videos relating to the impacts of pollution and climate change on the wildlife, however this video happened to stick in the social media sphere long enough to cause a stir.
In the context of environmental upset and helplessness, the plastic straw became the epitome of our harmful single-use plastic culture. In the space of a couple of months, plastic straws were disappearing from venues and public discourse stigmatised their use. Massive chain restaurants such as McDonalds and Starbucks announced plans to ban the plastic straw, as well as some cities and countries introducing bans or taxes on similar single-use products.
While this is ultimately a positive movement with good intention, rejecting the use of plastic straws is an easy and short-term relief to an overwhelming frustration with single-use consumer culture. This year we’ve been seeing similar trends emerge with the rise of keep-cup popularity and debates over plastic bags in super markets.
These trends may be tokenistic, however, they are telling of widespread sentiment and signify the public’s desire to be heard and responded too.
Loren is an experienced marketing professional who translates data and insights using Isentia solutions into trends and research, bringing clients closer to the benefits of audience intelligence. Loren thrives on introducing the groundbreaking ways in which data and insights can help a brand or organisation, enabling them to exceed their strategic objectives and goals.
An organisation’s reputation is at its core, really how people feel about them. These feelings can be based on their interaction and knowledge of the brand, or their experience with the products and services the organisation provides. This reputation is important as it can often dictate the actions or choices audiences and buyers make, impacting an organisation financially and its ability to grow. If managed and measured, the value of an organisations reputation can safeguarded and used as a source of growth by strategically influencing key consumer’s consideration over the competition and the market more broadly.
People can interact directly with an organisation more than ever before, on social media, targeted advertisements, in-store experiences, customer support to name a few.
Social media is a great place to listen to the voice of consumers and key audiences who choose to voice their experiences online. It provides insight into what your organisation has done well or needs to do better. When used in conjunction with additional data, like survey analysis it can also reveal what channels and content are contributing to this perception, and how this can be shifted. Drawing from online resources and social media, Isentia has established 3 drivers to identify and quantify an organisation’s reputation.
The first driver is about the future direction of an organisation.
Does your organisation have a strong leader? Does your organisation seek to innovate? Does it shape the way society thinks? Is your organisation authentic in its messaging? Is your organisation likely to succeed?
When an organisation shows these qualities, it raises consumer trust and confidence, but it’s important that this is authentic. An example of this is Honestbee. Honestbee’s strategy covered several of these points - they were a fast expanding and innovative Singaporean startup in the online grocery delivery business. The founders focused on being perceived as successful, with plans for rapid expansion.
However, In October 2018, Habitat, the world’s first tech-integrated multi-sensory grocery and dining destination launched. Three months after the launch of Habitat, it was discovered Honestbee was deep in financial debt. This was a shock to the industry as Honestbee had a good strategy. Their downfall had been in their inauthentic messaging which resulted in the organisation losing trust of their consumers and investors.
Culture is determined by the organisation having strong values and integrity.
Is the organisation socially responsible? Are practices fair and transparent? Do they promote a balanced workplace? Is it an environment where people aspire to work? Do they have ethical relationships with their business partners?
The growing number of organisations ‘going green’ is as good example of how the market can reflect and appeal to the values of today, in this case by demonstrating they're more environmentally conscious. In a 2019 Nielsen study, it was shown 1 in 3 consumers prefer eco- friendly products. Both Fairprice and Redmart, grocery chains in Singapore, also expressed growth in demand for their environmentally friendly products.
An organisation’s workplace culture, including ethical behaviour can also negatively impact an organisation. For example, Google was challenged for the way cases of sexual harassment were handled within the workplace. They were also challenged for questionable deals in AI technology that resulted in a protest of 20,000 employees across their offices. Google’s poor behaviour was exposed which led to criticism from Amnesty International and a backlash on social media.
Delivery is how good an organisation is at delivering on it’s day to day business.
Do people perceive the organisations products are good quality? Are the products well received? Is the organisation well known in the industry? Do customers have a good experience? Are they successful?
A good example of how delivery can be analysed is in the sphere of reputation is the case of, Razer Inc. known as an organisation passionate about gaming. With a tagline ‘For Gamers. By Gamers’, they are well known in the gaming industry for supply gaming software, hardware and accessories.
According to their annual report, their revenue last year, hit an all-time high of 712 billion US dollars. While online reviews of their mostly praise the high quality of Razer products, a common complaint on sites such as trustpilot.com, Reddit and Forum Hardwarezone are about slow or unhelpful customer support. Some customers even expressed that due to the poor customer support for products, they were even considering switching brands. This signals an opportunity. While Razer Inc has performed well financially and seemingly has a message that appeals to their key consumer, by improving their touchpoint experience and capacity to deliver they could potentially eclipse the competition and swing those who were apathetic towards other brands.
This is just a small glimpse of how your organisation’s reputation can be analysed and measured by a combination of social media data and more traditional market research techniques. Executing a broad analysis of your organisation based on the 3 drivers of Strategy, Culture and Delivery, we can assist in gauging your organisation’s reputation and how it fares against competitors. With a clear metric for overall reputation and a breakdown of performance by driver, Isentia's Reputation Analysis helps your organisation identify areas for improvement and where there are opportunities to strengthen PR, marketing and engagement strategies.
Request a sample of Isentia's Reputation Analysis here.
An organisation’s reputation is at its core, really how people feel about them. These feelings can be based on their interaction and knowledge of the brand, or their experience with the products and services the organisation provides. This reputation is important as it can often dictate the actions or choices audiences and buyers make, impacting […]
Media = news coverage. Social = all public posts across X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads and Forums - everyone posting, not just media outlets.
Candidates and sitting MPs from the Green Party and Te Pāti Māori attended a meeting with Mongrel Mob members at a gang address. When photographs from the meeting were shared on social media, the response from commentators and rival parties was swift and largely critical.
This was not the week's highest-volume story, accounting for only 112 of 4,479 media items (2.5%, after filtering out unrelated international content) and 116 of 13,938 unique social posts (0.8%, after collapsing retweet/repost duplicates down to one count per message), well below the volume generated by ongoing leaders' debate coverage, which totalled 1,125 media items. Two independent methods nonetheless support treating it as a genuine, separable story: an exact keyword count aligns closely with an unsupervised clustering analysis of the entire media population, which identified it as a distinct 47-item cluster - smaller than general campaign coverage and several specific policy announcements, but clearly distinguishable from them. What sets the story apart is the intensity of the reaction rather than its scale: 72% of social commentary on the topic was negative, the most one-sided sentiment recorded for any subject this week, and the average post attracted roughly 5.7 times the typical level of engagement. Taken together, these figures point to a genuine public reaction concentrated on social platforms, and the episode provides National and ACT with a law-and-order narrative that may continue into coming weeks. It has not been linked to a tracked party policy below, as it reflects a matter of conduct rather than a policy position.
4,479 media items · 13,938 social items · share of each channel's own conversation, so the two bars are directly comparable
"Social" is all public posts across X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads and Forums - not just media organisations' own accounts.
The most active commentary this week came from Sean Plunket, the Chris Chang and Tova O'Brien pairing, and John MacDonald.
By follower reach, the most prominent social accounts posting about the election this week were major outlets' own accounts - the New Zealand Herald, 1News, RNZ, Stuff and Radio Tarana - alongside the official Labour Party account. Individual leaders' personal accounts posted actively but with smaller followings than these outlet and party accounts.
The Greens continue to receive disproportionately greater attention on social media relative to traditional news coverage, accounting for 20.4% of social party conversation compared with 14.1% in media coverage - roughly 1.4 times the media share.
Law and order shows a similarly pronounced gap between channels this week, accounting for 10.6% of social conversation compared with 5.3% in the news. This is consistent with the public reaction to the Mongrel Mob meeting, which appears to have generated considerably sharper engagement on social platforms than mainstream coverage volume alone would suggest.
Shown for the four largest parliamentary parties (National, Labour, Greens, NZ First); ACT, Te Pāti Māori and TOP are tracked elsewhere in this report but not included in this chart, so these shares sum to 100% of the four shown, not of all tracked parties. Share of conversation measures attention and mentions only - it is not polling and should not be read as an indication of electoral success.
Winston Peters leads the rankings this week, a shift driven primarily by a widely circulated moment in the minor-party leaders' debate in which he described diversity as "a weakness rather than a strength" while delivering a pointed critique of the left-leaning bloc. Christopher Luxon and Chris Hipkins follow closely behind as the campaign moves into its final weeks, while David Seymour and Chloe Swarbrick complete the top five, each drawing attention largely through their parties' own policy announcements this week.
Each major party's top-ranked issues this week, by real topic volume in their social conversation (after excluding other parties' names, individual people, and procedural or horse-race chatter), with how that conversation leaned
Volume and sentiment above are based on social media data only.
If you want to find out more about how Isentia can help you understand the NZ media landscape, please reach out to us here.
" ["post_title"]=> string(83) "NZ Election 2026: Mongrel Mob Controversy, Fiscal Policy and Greens on social media" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(156) "Explore New Zealand’s 2026 election conversation, from the Mongrel Mob meeting controversy and law and order to reactions to Labour’s capital gains tax." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(49) "nz-election-2026-mongrel-mob-fiscal-policy-greens" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2026-10-19 01:20:22" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2026-10-19 01:20:22" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(32) "https://www.isentia.com/?p=50464" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" }Explore New Zealand’s 2026 election conversation, from the Mongrel Mob meeting controversy and law and order to reactions to Labour’s capital gains tax.
A weekly tracker tracing the stories, figures and policies driving media and social coverage in the 2026 New Zealand General Election across Online News, TV, Radio, Newspaper, Magazine, X, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Threads and Forums. This edition covers conversations and coverage from 1st – 8th October, highlighting what’s shaping the election conversation.
National announced a five-point welfare policy: random drug testing for JobSeeker recipients (with sanctions for repeat failures), reduced payments for long-term beneficiaries, and a doubled stand-down period for repeatedly leaving jobs without good reason. Labour and the Greens called it "punching down" and "cruel"; ACT proposed going even further; Luxon defended it as "fairness" for taxpayers.
The single largest media cluster this week (183 of 600 sampled items) was generic "campaigning intensifies as election day nears" coverage. This welfare policy, while smaller by volume (29 items), is a genuine flashpoint: a specific, controversial announcement that sharply divided every major party and will likely keep generating reaction into next week.
4,360 media items · 17,277 social items · share of each channel's own conversation, so the two bars are directly comparable
The Greens get more than twice the relative attention on social media as in the news. On social, the Greens are 20.8% of party conversation; in the news, they're 10.3%.
Health is a top-four issue on social but not in the news this week - Infrastructure takes its place in media's top four instead. Social conversation is tilting toward the health system while media coverage stays on economy, cost of living and infrastructure announcements.
Share of conversation measures attention and mentions only - it is not polling and should not be read as an indication of electoral success.
Luxon and Hipkins remain close at the top as the campaign enters its final stretch. Peters follows, still driven by coalition speculation. Seymour moves up to fourth on the back of ACT's economic-reform push (including floating a higher superannuation age), overtaking Swarbrick, whose fifth-place mentions continue to track the Greens' polling strength.
Each major party's most prominent specific policy, and how social conversation reacted to it
Volume and sentiment above are based on social media data only.
If you want to find out more about how Isentia can help you understand the NZ media landscape, please reach out to us here.
" ["post_title"]=> string(71) "NZ Election 2026: Welfare, Greens and the policies driving conversation" ["post_excerpt"]=> string(152) "What’s shaping New Zealand’s 2026 election conversation? Explore the key policies, parties and issues driving media and social discussion this week." ["post_status"]=> string(7) "publish" ["comment_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["ping_status"]=> string(4) "open" ["post_password"]=> string(0) "" ["post_name"]=> string(69) "nz-election-2026-welfare-greens-and-the-policies-driving-conversation" ["to_ping"]=> string(0) "" ["pinged"]=> string(0) "" ["post_modified"]=> string(19) "2026-10-19 07:37:01" ["post_modified_gmt"]=> string(19) "2026-10-19 07:37:01" ["post_content_filtered"]=> string(0) "" ["post_parent"]=> int(0) ["guid"]=> string(32) "https://www.isentia.com/?p=50341" ["menu_order"]=> int(0) ["post_type"]=> string(4) "post" ["post_mime_type"]=> string(0) "" ["comment_count"]=> string(1) "0" ["filter"]=> string(3) "raw" }Get in touch or request a demo.