Executive Summary

This report synthesizes eight consecutive quarters of brand health tracking for VinFast across its home market of Vietnam and its priority expansion markets in Southeast Asia, the United States, and Western Europe. The tracking programme monitors four core pillars: brand awareness (aided and unaided), top-of-mind awareness within the electric vehicle category, multi-attribute consumer perception, and Net Promoter Score among owners and fleet buyers. 

The headline finding is a brand in the middle of a classic scale-up trajectory: awareness and top-of-mind recall are strong and improving fastest at home, perception is bifurcated between genuine strengths in design and technology and persistent weaknesses in service and reliability, and NPS has climbed steadily from single digits to the low thirties on a blended global basis, even as the United States remains the one market still in negative territory. Read together, the data suggest that VinFast's marketing and product story is landing with consumers faster than its service infrastructure and quality reputation are catching up, which is the central tension this report is built to surface for planning purposes.

Methodology

Data were collected through a continuous online and in-dealership tracking panel using a mixed-methods design: unaided and aided recall prompts to measure awareness, spontaneous "first brand that comes to mind" prompts to measure top-of-mind awareness, seven-point and ten-point Likert scales to measure perception across functional and emotional attributes, and the standard eleven-point likelihood-to-recommend question to derive Net Promoter Score. Each quarterly wave draws from a minimum sample of 1,200 respondents per market, split between category-aware non-owners and verified VinFast owners or fleet operators, with quota controls for age, gender, and urban/rural residence. 

NPS is calculated as the percentage of promoters (score 9–10) minus the percentage of detractors (score 0–6). All figures in this report are drawn from a representative illustrative tracking wave prepared for internal briefing and template purposes; they should be validated against the client's live research vendor data before being used in external communications or board reporting.

Brand Awareness

Aided and unaided awareness continue to show the expected geographic gradient of a company still mid-way through international expansion. In Vietnam, unaided awareness has reached 78% and aided awareness is effectively saturated at 96%, reflecting years of local manufacturing presence, government EV incentives, and dense dealership coverage. Awareness falls away sharply outside the home market: unaided recall sits at 41% in Indonesia and 33% in the Philippines, both markets where VinFast has opened assembly or distribution operations within the past two years, and drops further still to 14% in the United States and 11% in Western Europe, where the brand has a comparatively thin retail footprint and has relied more heavily on paid media and flagship stores than on physical distribution. The gap between aided and unaided awareness is itself informative: in every market the gap is at least eighteen points, indicating that a meaningful share of consumers recognize the VinFast name and logo when prompted but do not yet spontaneously generate it, which is a normal signature of a brand still building distinctive, top-of-funnel memory structures rather than a brand with a recognition problem.

Figure 1. Aided vs. unaided brand awareness across five priority markets.

Top-of-Mind Awareness

Within the Vietnamese electric vehicle category specifically, VinFast holds a commanding top-of-mind position, named first by 46% of respondents when asked which EV brand comes to mind, more than double the next competitor. Tesla and BYD trail at 18% and 15% respectively, with Hyundai and Toyota's hybrid and EV sub-brands further behind. This dominance is consistent with VinFast's category-defining role in Vietnam, where it was the first large-scale domestic EV manufacturer and continues to benefit from national pride positioning alongside aggressive dealership and charging infrastructure rollout. The strategic risk embedded in this figure is category-definition dependence: because VinFast effectively created top-of-mind salience for electric vehicles in Vietnam, any acceleration by well-funded global entrants such as BYD, which has been expanding distribution regionally, could erode share of mind faster than share of awareness, since top-of-mind position is generally the first metric to move when a well-resourced challenger enters a market and the last metric to recover once lost.

Figure 2. Top-of-mind awareness within the Vietnam EV category, unaided first-mention basis.

Consumer Perception

Perception data reveal a genuinely bifurcated brand image. VinFast scores meaningfully above category average on innovation and technology (8.1 versus 6.9), design and styling (7.9 versus 7.1), and value for money (7.6 versus 7.0), consistent with a product strategy built around feature-rich vehicles, distinctive exterior design, and aggressive price-to-spec positioning. These are durable, differentiating strengths that should continue to anchor brand communications. The picture inverts, however, on the attributes that typically govern long-term loyalty and repeat purchase: after-sales service (6.1 versus 7.3), reliability (6.4 versus 7.4), and brand trust (6.8 versus 7.2) all sit below category average, with after-sales service showing the widest negative gap of any attribute tracked. Safety perception is close to parity but still slightly behind (7.2 versus 7.5), which is worth monitoring given how heavily safety scores can influence purchase consideration in family and fleet segments. The combined pattern is one of a brand that wins the initial consideration and purchase decision on product appeal and price, then loses some of that goodwill during ownership, a sequence that shows up directly in the regional NPS analysis below.

Figure 3. Multi-attribute consumer perception, VinFast versus category average (0–10 scale).

Table 1. Attribute-level perception scores and gap to category average.

Net Promoter Score Analysis

Blended global NPS has risen steadily and materially, from +12 in Q3 2024 to +34 in the most recent Q2 2026 wave, an increase of 22 points over eight quarters. The trajectory has not been perfectly linear a dip from +24 to +21 between Q2 and Q3 2025 coincided with a reported wave of software and infotainment complaints that were subsequently addressed through an over-the-air update program but the overall direction is clearly positive and the rate of improvement has accelerated in the most recent three quarters. This trend is consistent with a company iterating quickly on early product issues and improving delivery experience as manufacturing and logistics processes mature.

Figure 4. Blended global NPS trend, Q3 2024 – Q2 2026.

The regional breakdown, however, shows the aggregate figure conceals sharp variation. Vietnamese owners are enthusiastic promoters at +42 NPS, and fleet and commercial buyers are similarly strong at +38, both segments benefiting from proximity to service infrastructure, familiarity with the brand's local reputation, and in the case of fleets, direct commercial support relationships with VinFast. Southeast Asian owners outside Vietnam sit at a respectable +22. The United States is the clear outlier at -6 NPS, the only market or segment in negative territory, though it has improved three points quarter-on-quarter and appears to be on a recovery path rather than a deteriorating one. European owners are roughly neutral at +3. The through-line across every segment is that NPS correlates closely with proximity to dense service and charging infrastructure: markets and segments with the thinnest after-sales networks post the weakest scores, reinforcing the perception-data finding that service, not product appeal, is the binding constraint on advocacy.

Figure 5. Net Promoter Score by region and customer segment, Q2 2026.

Table 2. NPS by segment with quarter-on-quarter movement.

Key Drivers & Strategic Recommendations

Three priorities emerge clearly from this wave of tracking data.

• Close the service and reliability gap first. After-sales service is the single lowest-scoring attribute and the clearest statistical driver of the US market's negative NPS; expanding certified service capacity and loaner-vehicle programs in under-served markets should be the top operational priority, since it addresses both the perception gap and the NPS gap with one investment.
• Protect top-of-mind position in Vietnam proactively. Category-defining awareness is valuable but fragile once well-capitalized competitors scale local distribution; continued visibility investment and dealer-network defense in the home market will matter more over the next four quarters than incremental awareness spend in nascent markets.
• Lead brand communications with innovation, design, and value. These three attributes are durable, above-category strengths and the clearest wedge against both legacy automakers and other EV entrants; perception campaigns in the US and Europe should foreground them rather than attempting to compete on service claims the operational data does not yet support.
• Treat the US market as a distinct recovery program rather than a standard growth market. Its negative NPS, low top-of-mind and awareness base, and thinner service network mean it needs a dedicated remediation plan rather than the same playbook used in Southeast Asia.

Conclusion

VinFast's brand health data describe a company successfully building awareness and category leadership faster than it is building the service infrastructure needed to convert that awareness into advocacy. The strengths are real and defensible design, innovation, and value perception all sit meaningfully above category average but so are the risks, concentrated almost entirely in after-sales service, reliability, and the still-negative US NPS score. The recommended path forward is not a repositioning of the brand story, which is resonating, but a sustained operational investment in service capacity and reliability that allows perception and NPS to catch up to the awareness and top-of-mind position the brand has already earned.