Aldi: The impact of news coverage on the brand and consumers.

Aldi’s focus on value has created brand loyalty and ongoing expansion as shoppers increasingly choose discounters for groceries. Media coverage has demonstrably helped the brand on its growth journey. Aldi has encountered some unusually strong news headwinds in the last year or so, however. This matters. News has a powerful impact on business and brand. Good news helps build brand strength and protect reputation. Damaging coverage can have a lasting impact on brand reputation, sales and financial performance. 

Using a combination of YouGov BrandIndex and Metricomm media audience data, this case study looks at how Aldi has been affected by the impact of news coverage on the brand and consumers over time. 

Background.

In the YouGov UK supermarket rankings 2025, Aldi topped the table for value, outperforming its close rival Lidl by 3.4 points. Aldi was judged third overall – behind Tesco and Sainsbury’s – when shoppers were asked which brands they would consider buying from when they next needed to purchase groceries. Among Millennials, it came in second place for consideration. 

Similarly, Which? Found that Aldi was the cheapest supermarket in 2024 and 2025. According to Kantar Worldpanel data, its market share to August 2025 was 10.8%, still well behind market leader Tesco but a highly popular choice for value-conscious consumers as the cost of living continues to challenge shoppers. 

Aldi is a massive success story in the UK market. The brand reported UK revenues of £18.1bn in the year ended December 2024, up 4.8% on the previous year. Operating profit, however, fell by around 21%, as the brand continues investment in price discounts and new store openings. Tight margins in the supermarket sector make businesses vulnerable to small shifts in consumer preferences as they pursue growth strategies. Therefore, Aldi executives have good reason to keep a close eye on indicators of consumer perceptions and behaviour. In particular, it helps to be aware of the impact media coverage has on brand health and ensuring people continue to walk through the door of their local store.

Overall, news coverage made a significant contribution to Aldi’s commercial success to February 2024. The following chart reveals the extent to which key YouGov BrandIndex indicators were influenced by the audience engaging with online news about the brand as it expanded in the UK.

Quantifying the influence of online news through the funnel: all sectors.

Online news coverage shifts the needle on a range of BrandIndex metrics along the path to purchase – this can be negative as well as positive.

At the top of the funnel, the size of audience reading online news about Aldi influenced 76% of BrandIndex net buzz for the brand between October 2020 and February 2024. Net buzz is positive buzz minus negative buzz. 

The next chart shows that the online news audience has been instrumental in Aldi’s success in the UK over time, cementing long-term brand health. 

• The strong relationship between the news audience and positive buzz for Aldi is immediately visible 
• Between October 2020 and February 2024, 82% of Aldi’s positive buzz was influenced by people reading online news about the brand 
• This supported advertising, pricing strategies and promotional activities to create an increasingly positive view of the brand 
• During this period, Aldi will have invariably received coverage which traditional media evaluation would have classed as ‘negative’. However, as the healthy uptrend shows, none of this had a noticeably detrimental impact on positive consumer views. 

An aside about coverage volume vs audience size. 

The powerful impact of news only becomes visible and quantifiable when data reflecting the size of audience is used. When we repeated the analysis using volume of coverage instead of audience size, there is no relationship between PR activity and Aldi buzz. The chart below illustrates this. It reflects the fact that articles are not equal in impact and importance. An online piece in thesun.co.uk will engage a far larger audience than anything that appears in a regional title like bristolpost.co.uk or trade publication such as thegrocer.co.uk. 

The media evaluation industry is coming round to the fact that volume and sentiment are poor metrics. Meanwhile, brands are recognising that audience-centric metrics of the type used across other parts of the marketing mix provide a far more accurate reading. After all, volume-based analysis and sentiment ultimately only reveal what journalists think. Brands are much more interested in genuinely understanding what their customers care about and what drives commercial success. 

Topics shaping customer perceptions.

Further analysis of the data reveals the topics in news coverage which have the greatest impact on consumer reaction during ‘business-as-usual’.

• For Aldi, up to February 2024, when ‘quality’ or ‘cheap’ appeared in online news coverage, it had the greatest short-term impact on positive consumer buzz. 
• ‘Deal’ and ‘cheap’ were the topics having the greatest long-term impact on positive consumer buzz. This reflects the findings of the YouGov UK supermarket rankings, where Aldi is positioned as the best value for money food retailer.

The impact of damaging coverage.

Metricomm analysis across hundreds of brands and various sectors has shown that consumers are only affected by news that genuinely damaging, especially where the brand is deemed to be culpable and where the size of media audience increases rapidly. Minor crises are quickly forgiven if a brand is strong. However, even the best-loved brands cannot always resist the headwinds of news.

Aldi has recently experienced such a situation, where product recalls and contamination made headlines. The chart below reveals the impact on positive buzz of these stories:

The first observation from the chart is that the impact of truly damaging coverage can last a long time; in this case more than a year, from July 2024 onwards.

The size of audience reading online news about Aldi and product recalls / contamination continues to grow as journalists find more reasons to write about it.

As soon as the damaging coverage begins to appear in July 2024, the positive buzz around the Aldi brand starts to decline (green line on chart).

When the analysis was done, positive buzz had not recovered and continued its downtrend.

Precision insights about coverage impact. 

The ability to quantify the relative impact of topics in news on a wide range of consumer metrics helps brands understand why, when and how news exerts a powerful impact on consumers. 

It is important to note again that volume of coverage is not always a reliable indicator that negative news will affect consumers. In a genuine crisis, the volume of coverage and consumer attention will inevitably increase – for example, around topics such as food poisoning. However, Metricomm has analysed brands where the volume of coverage (sometimes hundreds of articles) suggests the brand should be in crisis, but where there has been negligible reaction from consumers on any of the BrandIndex metrics. 

In Aldi’s case, there was a major impact on the BrandIndex indicators, as the chart below reveals: 

Quantifying the influence of online news through the funnel: all sectors 

Online news coverage shifts the needle on a range of BrandIndex metrics along the path to purchase – this can be negative as well as positive. 

Refer back to the metrics on the previous version of the Aldi funnel chart to appreciate how different it looked. 

• To February 2024, net buzz influenced by online news was 76%. Following the coverage about health hazards and contaminants in food, this plummeted to 3% 
• The impact of news on consideration for Aldi fell from 56% to -96%, reflecting consumer concerns about product safety 
• For purchase intent, the outcome was similar. This indicator dropped from 66% to -95%. 

Alerting the C-suite to trouble ahead.

The turnaround in consumer-centric metrics above would set alarm bells ringing in any boardroom. The ability to compare what happens in a crisis with business-as-usual leaves no room for doubt that adverse media coverage is likely to have far-reaching implications for the business. Aldi reported record earnings in 2024, as we noted earlier. Yet margins are reducing and profits are falling. Our analysis shows that this is almost certainly due to factors beyond investment in the retail estate, although the price promotions cited by the brand are one way in which businesses often respond to indications that consumers are turning away. 

Positive buzz for Aldi is still trending downwards, as we also observed earlier. Comparing Aldi data directly with that for Lidl, we conclude that this will inevitably affect share of wallet.

A possible strategic response?

How might Aldi redress the balance? Evidently, the Comms team must work hard to keep additional damaging stories out of the news. This will prevent journalists from keeping the negative news cycle alive. That is only the tip of the iceberg when comes to restoring brand health and consumer confidence.

You can download the full version of this case study, with additional data charts, insights and conclusions, here: Metricomm YouGov_Aldi Case Study

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