It’s the most wonderful time of the year. And for the biggest supermarkets, the most important time of the year too.

Particularly after a year that, shall we say, has presented its own set of challenges.

At MSQ, we believe in High EQ Brands. That businesses need to have emotional intelligence in order to truly understand what its customers feel, so they can act accordingly. High EQ brands deliver experiences with integrity, empathy and coherence. Which earns trust, delivers sales and encourages repeat purchase.

So we thought we’d see how each supermarket fared in exhibiting emotional intelligence in its biggest moment of the year – the Christmas TV ad showdown!

Using state-of-the-art facial expression software from twentysix, combined with insight and analysis from Freemavens and data science from Stack, we were able to draw findings as to how each of the major supermarket’s ads resonated emotionally with viewers, drawing parallels with sentiment shared online.

And we summed up the findings in our lovely infographic, which you may have seen on our social channels…

We could also see which emotions were being generated through social media – and what themes were triggering those feelings…

Here’s where the bulk of the themes sat for one of the winners, Waitrose…

And here’s how the themes presented themselves for Asda and M&S…

Of course, the next step is to revisit the data in the New Year to see how the supermarkets performed against expected sales. But what we’ve certainly seen from the Christmas showdown, is that the more emotionally intelligent a brand is, the more likely it is to create communications that are remembered, shared and generate positive sentiment.

And that’ll bring a Merry Christmas for everyone.