What's the most popular German car where you live?

by Tim Winke
PhD student in Demography and Social Sciences in Berlin

This post has been abstracted from Tim's entry to a contest that Dalia Research is running based on a global smarthpone survey that they are conducting. Tim's entry post is available as is all of the code behind it. - editor

When people think about Germany, what comes to their mind? Oktoberfest, ok – but Mercedes might be second or BMW or Porsche. German car brands have a solid reputation all over the world, but how popular is each brand in different countries?

There are plenty of survey data out there but hardly anyone collects answers within a couple of days from 6 continents. A new start-up called Dalia Research found a way to use smartphone and tablet networks to conduct surveys. It’s not a separate app but works via thousands of apps where targeted users decide to take part in a survey in exchange for an incentive.

In August 2014, they asked 51 questions to young mobile users in 64 countries including Colombia, Iran and the Ukraine. This is impressive – you have access to opinions of 32 000 people collected within 4 days from all over the world – 500 respondents in each country – about their religion, what they think about the Unites States, about where the EU has global influence or if Qatar should host the 2022 FIFA World Cup, and also: “What is your favorite German car brand?”.

Surprisingly, as the map below shows, BMW seems to be the most popular German car brand – and Volkswagen does not reach the pole position in any country.

 

The ggplot2 stacked barchart provides even more detail.

To see how I employed dplyr, ggplot2 and rworldmap to construct these plots as well as how to integrate the survey data with world development indicators from the World Bank please have a look at my original post.