UKAEG Member Survey

Our annual poll has become a regular feature of this export report, and this is the third year of running this exercise. This year we had 38 respondents responding to the survey questions.

Our survey was limited to 10 questions (see Table 2) framed around topics that featured in previous years, such as the company’s ability to adapt its portfolio, prospects for securing new business, how they felt about the UK as a global hub. Questions 1, 2 & 10 were slightly modified to make them more contemporary but retained the underlying themes.

One of the more exciting aspects of this analysis is the use of text mining techniques to derive insights. The responses to the surveys were systematically analysed to measure sentiment and highlight salient topics to understand how UKAEG members felt about prospects for the coming year.

Table 2. List of questions shared with UKAEG members. *Modified questions

Using the text obtained from the response we ran sentiment analysis software to systematically determine whether the response given was positive or negative. Additionally, we produced a word frequency chart and word cloud to highlight key themes that were common across all the responses. Some of the responses were modified to retain anonymity of the responder and client names were removed to protect commercial sensitivity. Responses such as “No comment” or “N/A” were also replaced with blanks to prevent skewing of the data.

Sentiment Analysis

Given the technical nature of the sentiment analysis we only provide a summary of the key findings here. For those interested in the detailed results can find them in Annex C. Two tests were conducted: the first test analysed responses to individual questions and the second analysed general sentiment per respondent.

The systematic nature of the analysis reduces the potential for bias in interpreting the responses and assigning a score to it.

Respondent sentiment was the most positive around how the UK was doing against its global ambition (question 10) as it had the highest average sentiment score among the group. But it also had a relative high range of sentiment values which could be interpreted as having a greater diversity of views. This appears to be linked to the fact that the question is effectively formed of two parts. There was positive sentiment around creative industries and green growth, but negativity around Brexit and the current political situation.

There was also a lot of positivity concerning the ability to adapt services to remain competitive (question 1). Although, the highest score was only five, the range of values was narrower compared to question 10 which suggested more consensus on this topic.

Thinking about barriers trading overseas (question 9) provoked the lowest sentiment among the questions. Additionally, the smaller range of sentiment values for this question indicate a greater consensus of views. One note of caution is that the phrasing of question itself may have invoked a negative response. That said, some of the responses touched upon issues around economic uncertainty, costs of travel, Brexit, customs, and talent.

At a company level there seemed to be general positive sentiment from most respondents. UKAEG members operating in the digital communications and production sphere seemed most bullish. However, members whose business is more focussed on promotional material frequently noted issues about moving goods and customs clearance.

Word Frequency Analysis

Word frequency analysis is essentially the study of the distribution and count of words in a text corpus. The benefit of this type of analysis is that it brings to the fore words that are salient to UKAEG members and we can use this to infer issues of interest. When applying this type of analysis is it important to utilise a “stop word” list which removes accessory words or words that do not convey a particular meaning. This can include words like “and” or “the”. These lists can be customised to remove or add specific words, for example on this occasion it was decided to remove “UK”.

In figure 9, we can see the frequency of the most used words across all the responses. The graph is limited to words that featured n>10. What is interesting to note is that Brexit still features highly and is ranked the sixth most used word among respondents and around eight places higher compared to the 2021 list. Unsurprisingly, COVID or the pandemic does not feature on the list and suggests that this is no longer a concern or priority for UKAEG members. We also see words like “talent” featuring a lot higher, and “innovation” entering the discourse. The word cloud (figure 10) is a more illustrative way to highlight these keywords.

Figure 9. A frequency distribution of keywords found in this year’s survey responses. N=frequency. Source: Credos and UKAEG.