Benchmarking the share of voice of Coca-Cola, Red Bull and Pepsi

Today we’re comparing three soft drink brands: Coca Cola, Pepsi and Red Bull. All are big names in the beverages industry. We’ll use BuzzTalk’s benchmark tool to find out which brand is talked about the most and how people feel about this brand. As you probably know it’s not enough if people talk about your brand. You want them to be positive and enthusiastic.

Coca Cola has the largest Share of Voice

In order to benchmark these brands we’ve created three Media Reports in BuzzTalk. These are all set-up the same way. We include news sites, blogs, journals and Twitter for the time period starting at 23 September 2013. In these reports we didn’t include printed media.

As you can see Coca Cola (blue) is the dominant brand online. Nearly 45% of the publications mention Coca Cola. Red Bull (green) and Pepsi Cola (red) follow close to each other at 29 and 26%.

Benchmarking the Buzz as not all buzz is created equal

Coca Cola doesn’t dominate everywhere on the web. If we take a closer look the dominance of Coca Cola is predominantly caused by it’s share of tweets. When we zoom in on news sites we notice it’s Red Bull who’s got the biggest piece of the pie. On blogs (not shown) Coca Cola and Red Bull match up.

Is Coca Cola’s dominance on Twitter due to Beliebers?

About 99,6% of Coca Cola related publications is on Twitter. Most of these tweets relate to the Coca-Cola.FM radio station in South America in relation with Justin Bieber. On 12th November Coca Cola streamed the concert of this young pop star and what we’re seeing here is the effect of ‘Beliebers’ on the share of voice.

The Coca Cola Christmas effect can still be detected

The Bieber effect is even stronger than christmas (42884 versus 2764 tweets).

Last year we demonstrated what’s marking the countdown to the holidays: it’s the release of the new Coca Cola TV-commercial. What we noticed then was a sudden increase in the mood state ‘tension’. In the following graph you can see it’s still there (Coca Cola is still in blue).

The mood state ‘tension’ relates to both anxiety and excitement. It’s the emotion we pick up during large product releases. If this is the first time you’re reading about mood states we recommend reading this blogpost as an introduction. Mood states are an interesting add-on to sentiment to be used in predictions about human behavior. The ways in which actual predictions can be made are subject of ongoing research.

How do we feel about these brands?

Let’s examine some more mood states and see whether we can find a mood state that’s clearly associated with a brand. As you can see in the graphs below each soft drink brand gets it fair share of mood state tension. Tension not specific for Coca Cola, though it is more prominent during the countdown towards christmas.

Pepsi Cola evokes the most ‘confusion’ and slightly more ‘anger’. The feelings of confusion are often related to feeling quilty after drinking (too much) Pepsi.

Red Bull generates the most mood states as it’s dominating not only for fatigue, but also – to a lesser extend – for depression, tension and vigor.

Striking is the amount of publications for Red Bull in which the mood state fatigue can be detected. They say “Red Bull gives you wings” and this tag line has become famous. People now associated tiredness with the desire for Red Bull. But people also blame Red Bull for (still) feeling tired or more tired. At least it’s good to see Red Bull also has it’s share in the ‘vigor’ mood state department.

Benchmarking the buzz and drilling down into sources and mood states are just a couple of things you can do with BuzzTalk. If you want the bigger picture, feel free to download our eBook below.