Two of the most popular hair care brands—Herbal Essences and Pantene—promise the same thing: shiny, healthy hair. While we don’t doubt either brand’s power in the shower we’re much more interested in who has the best social style. To find out, we’ve put the two brands head-to-head in this week’s Social Media Face Off.
In order to compare the brands in social media, we set up search streams for each in the uberVU platform and have compared the results from the past two weeks to determine our winner.
Let’s see which brand is having the best hair day in social.
Round One: Mentions
With 23,875 mentions, Pantene easily wins round one with more than 10 times as many mentions as Herbal Essences, who only pulled 2,167 mentions.
Winner: Pantene
Round Two: Sentiment
Pantene pulled ahead with mentions, but the hair care brands are pretty close when it comes to sentiment. Herbal Essences takes the win for just barely having a higher percentage of positive mentions—28% compared with Pantene’s 27%. Herbal Essences does have a slightly higher percentage of negative mentions but also a lower amount of neutral mentions. The brand is eliciting more opinions in general and as always, positivity wins.
Winner: Herbal Essences
Round Three: Conversation Mapping
uberVU’s conversation maps dive deeper into social conversations to show the most-talked about topics in a brand’s stream. The maps for Herbal Essences and Pantene are pretty similar with both maps pulling in what one would expect for hair care brands with phrases like “hair,” “shampoo,” and “conditioner” all appearing. Both brands have a large international following so it took some research to translate the rest of the phrases. While most of Pantene’s phrases were positive, the ones for Herbal Essences were on the negative side. If you’ve ever seen a Herbal Essences commercial you’ll understand why words like “orgasmos” are trending. (We assume you don’t need a translation on that one.) The international audience doesn’t seem to find the brand’s humor funny. Most appear to be genuinely confused by the commercials and others are comparing it to porn. Ouch.
Translation: I am ashamed to view advertisements of herbal essences
Winner: Pantene
Overall Winner: Pantene
With wins in overall mentions and conversation mapping, we declare the winner of this Social Media Face Off to be Pantene. Congrats, Pantene! Lather, rinse, repeat.