Talkwalker’s Battle of the Brands: Gillette Vs Dove

A weekly section on brand chatter in the social space

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Talkwalker’s Battle of the Brands: Gillette Vs Dove

Another week calls for another battle of the brands. Competing in the ring today are two, very

well-known personal care brands: Gillette vs Dove. Both very global as individual brands, both

owned by very global multinational brands: Procter & Gamble and Unilever.

Gillette has come under some heavy fire recently because of their latest ad campaign surrounding the #metoo movement and Dove had to navigate some rough weather not so long ago. How do both brands fare in the social space, who owns the conversation and knows how to get their community engaged?

Talkwalker, a social media analytics company, based in Luxembourg, takes a closer look at the buzz, using their platform. It analyses the performance of mentions all over the internet and provides key metrics such as engagement, related themes, demographic data, geographic data and influencer data. We reproduce the findings in two parts:

Mentions: Being two huge market players in the material world, it's very interesting to see how their popularity and market presence fare on social. Looking at the breakdown of mentions from 2018, it was Dove who owned the majority of mentions, averaging at about 21K mentions against 15.6K mentions of Gillette. Unsurprisingly this lead has continued through the start of the year - until last week where you can see Gillette’s social mention suddenly spiked an impressive 13.9K mentions past Dove.

Rising to that many mentions in such a short time period is very impressive and usually a strong indicator of a classic case of virality. Virality, however, can come in two forms – positive and negative. And in the case of Gillette - it has unfortunately been very negative this year.

Sentiment: The fact that this year alone, the sentiment around Gillette is ~75% negative sounds a strong alarm bell for the brand. Dove, on the other hand has a largely positive sentiment (77% positive).

You can also see that the engagement for Gillette related posts is far more than that of Dove related posts which means that indeed, Gillette has gone viral, just not in the best way. There are a bunch of influencers tweeting about how Gillette is most definitely not the best a man can get.

Next week: How India fared in the Gillette online debate?

(Talkwalker provides social media software to protect, measure and promote brands.)