Give Tylenol to the Kids, Take Advil for Pain

Crimson Hexagon’s battle of the brands series highlights how consumers feel about the brands they interact with on a regular basis.  Applying this lens to social media content is intriguing because it provides unique access to the ever-elusive “voice of the customer.”  While conventional social media monitoring tools can’t focus on this level of detail, Crimson Hexagon’s underlying science can quantify abstract concepts without keywords.

For our second head-to-head match-up, we looked at two brands of pain reliever that are in most household medicine cabinets: Tylenol and Advil.  With the FDA announcement about the risks of acetaminophen earlier this summer and the widespread discussion about the H1N1 virus (Swine Flu), there is no shortage of conversation, advice, and opinion about these brands online.

We analyzed opinions about Tylenol and Advil from April 1^st to September 6^th of this year.  Using our technology, we focused on customers’ experiences with the medications, drawing from blogs, forums, and public Facebook and MySpace content.  Here’s what we found:

Themes in Online Conversation: Tylenol & Advil

Brand Focus: Tylenol

Brand Focus: Advil

• Advil is primarily associated with strong pain relief, especially for headaches (60% combined), while Tylenol has more varied discussion.
• Overall people seem to think that Tylenol is safer.  More people (18% vs. 9%) trust Tylenol enough to give it to their children.  While there is conversation about the risks associated with each product, only Tylenol also inspires discussion about its safety and gentleness (8%).  6% of people talk about Tylenol as the brand their doctor recommends while no detectable proportion of the Advil conversation points to a doctor’s recommendation.

Trends over time: Tylenol

NOTE: Spike corresponds to FDA recommendation on lower maximum dosage for acetaminophen (June 30, 2009)

• When the FDA announced a recommendation to lower dosages of acetaminophen, the main active ingredient in Tylenol, conversation briefly spiked as people became concerned about Tylenol and liver damage, then fell back to its original levels.

Target Beats Walmart Online

Among the many uses of Crimson Hexagon’s technology, analyzing how consumers feel about a particular brand is one of the most interesting to us. Part of the appeal is how hard such sentiment is to measure through conventional means; part of it is how social media provides a window on what consumers really think in their day-to-day conversations.  It’s also that this application makes particular use of one feature of our technology – the ability to quantify abstract concepts instead of just keywords – that is entirely unique to our underlying science.

To spotlight this we’re starting an occasional blog series called “The Battle of the Brands”.  We’ll choose two (and sometimes maybe three) competing brands and analyze how they’re discussed in the online conversation, quantifying the range of opinions and perceptions that shape the online brand identity.

Our first head-to-head will be none other than Walmart versus Target.   With the recent news of Target’s planned increase in marketing spend , we started thinking: are the online perceptions of each brand consistent with the concerns expressed by Target?  And how will this increase in marketing spending impact those opinions?

We analyzed online opinions about Walmart and Target from July 15^th to September 3rd. Using our technology, we focused on customers’ opinion about the shopping experience, drawing from blogs, forums, Tweets, and public Facebook and MySpace content.  Here’s what we found:

Target (all opinions)

Walmart (all opinions)

• Overall, the online conversation about Walmart was chiefly critical, breaking down into 61% negative and 39% positive.  Target enjoyed 75% positive reactions with only 25% negative opinions.

• People talk about the social implications of shopping at Walmart (Bad for Local Business, Treats Employees Poorly categories), but when talking about Target focus on their actual shopping experience.

Walmart (shopping conversation only)

• The motivations for shopping at each retailer are vastly different:   People shop at Walmart because they’re looking for cheap staples.   At Target they feel that can get great stuff (Love this Product, Awesome Clothes categories) for a low price.  Customers get more excited about shopping at Target, but, a larger percentage finds Walmart to be a better bet for low prices.

Walmart is currently seen as the brand delivering the basics at low prices, but price comes at a cost in quality of products and services. Fortunately for Walmart, being seen as the low cost provider buoys the brand during tough economic times.  Target, on the other hand, is the brand that delivers a more enjoyable shopping experience, with more excitement expressed for products and deals.  However, this may not be the best attribute to reinforce when consumers are “tightening their belts” and “getting back to basics”.  The interesting aspect of this battle will come when the economy and consumer confidence starts to pick up.  Will the tables turn for Target and Walmart?  How can these two brand giants balance their core brand attributes to win over consumers in the good times and bad?  And as Target executes expensive marketing campaigns, how will they measure whether their investment is having the intended impact?