From Trend to Truth: What Abercrombie's Customer Sentiment Reveals About Their Rebrand

Purpose of Analysis

When companies go through a rebrand, it’s ALWAYS high risk.

Think about the Coca-Cola fiasco back in 1985, when the company tried to switch up the recipe for Coke entirely once more people started preferring Pepsi. It seemed like a good idea at the time. But it wasn’t long before they realized how heavily this would tick off their existing Coca-Cola fanbase. And of course — they ended up reverting to the original formula.

But see, this isn’t uncommon. Most rebrands fail (around 70% according to Forbes), and it’s usually pretty obvious whether or not a rebrand is a success or a failure based on the initial public reaction.

For Abercrombie, I’m sure they breathed a huge sigh of relief when sales surged 16% in 2023, shooting their stock up by nearly 300% that same year.

But this story’s likely not over. There’s been a LOT of hype about A&F recently, but the question is: Is this just a fad, or is A&F actually making the comeback many are claiming they’re making?

The Analysis

To try to answer this question, we wanted to see whether or not customer satisfaction levels actually increased as a result of both A&F’s 2015 rebrand and their 2021 rebrand. And to do this, we ran thousands of their reviews through our sentiment analysis program.

The first thing we saw was that the proportion of positive sentiment had been increasing since their 2015 rebrand, but decreasing since their 2021 rebrand. The red segments in the graph below show the volume of negative reviews during each month.

On the flip side, the number of reviews overall steadily increased after both rebrands, implying that they did drive more sales. This is clearly true, considering how high their sales jumped last year.

To go a bit deeper, we wanted to find out what exactly was driving all this negative sentiment. So we had our program break down each piece of negative feedback by category.

At first glance, we can see that the highest proportion of negative sentiment is usually attributed to customer service, especially in recent years. Over the past 3 years, complaints about customer service have been increasing rapidly.

Wait time issues have also become more frequent, which is not surprising, considering sales have increased.

What’s also interesting is that along with wait times, complaints about return policies have increased over time, which could imply that the number of customers attempting to return their purchases has also risen.

Meaningfulness of Results

This all unfortunately suggest that A&F’s huge increase in sales this past year could very well be a fleeting trend that is bound to pass over. More and more people appear to be returning their purchases, and while new customers seem to be excited about the fashionability of their new clothes, lot’s of long-time customers are a bit frustrated.

Granted, we only looked at reviews from a select few stores — so a larger sample would offer more accurate results — but there does appear to be a pretty clear pattern nevertheless.

With complaints about customer service also spiking, this should be especially alarming to A&F. It could be that A&F has put off strengthening customer service in the hopes of focusing their efforts on changing up their product lines. But to find out exactly why people are unsatisfied with their customer experiences, a deeper dive is needed (something Cotera can do with a bit more data).

Paying little attention to customer service is a slippery slope, as we’ve seen with brands like Wayfair. But paying little attention to the signs we've seen in the data like the increases in refunds and growing proportion of unhappy customers is even more dangerous.

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