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Introduction

In the cell-phone space, there are two major platforms – Apple iOS and Android, who control over 90% of the market.  Most people pick a side, and don’t stray from their “team”, and frequently I hear one team bashing the other saying things like “my phone can do X, I know yours can’t” or “maybe if you would have gotten X phone instead”.  It gets pretty comical at times, but each side has those diehard fans that are extremely loyal to their brand, and they aren’t afraid to let the other side know where they stand.  I chose my side a few years back (I won’t disclose what I use!), and don’t think I could ever switch to the “other side”.  What I’m curious about though is what exactly do consumers like and dislike about each – are their points the same and it’s really only a matter of preference?  Or is one technology ultimately superior and the other is just lagging behind?

Fortunately for me I have the advantage of working for a company that provides analytics software and services, so I thought it would be interesting to analyze some reviews about two of the leading models: Apple iPhone 6 and Samsung Galaxy S6.  Yes, I know the iPhone 6 has been on the market longer – but we can still compare and perform both a meaningful and valid analysis

Data

Online reviews contain structured data such as star rating, date, and location, and unstructured data in the form of the review text.  The review text also offers us two different ways to view the results, the grouping of topics that consumers are talking about as well as the sentiment tied to those topics.  These different types of data can be analyzed both independently of each other, as well as together.  For this example I’m going to start with just the overall star-rating as my data, but stay tuned for the rest of this series to dig deeper into the review text as well as the text and ratings tied together.

Analysis Results

 

More information about the “Score Detail Chart” can be found on the ChartExpo™ website.

The first question you probably have is “how do I read the charts, and what are they telling me”?  Every time a consumer leaves a review they are classified as a promoter, neutral, or detractor based upon the rating used.  Ratings of 5-star are considered promoters since they’re leaving the best possible rating.  Ratings of 4-star are considered to be neutral, as these raters are saying that the product is good, but not great.  Those who leave ratings of 1 through 3-star are considered detractors, as the message they’re sending with their rating is that the product is average at best.

Calculating the score is very straightforward: the engine takes the percentage of people that leave promoter scores, and subtract the percentage of people that leave detractor scores and then we have the score.  In the iPhone example (Fig. 1), 65% of reviewers were promoters and only 14% of the reviewers were detractors, so therefore 65% minus 14% equals the score of positive 51, as can be seen in Fig. 1.

Overall, it appears that iPhone users are much more satisfied with their phones than the Galaxy users; since the iPhone score of 51 is nearly triple the Galaxy’s score of 18.  Another interesting piece of data is that 65%, or 2 out of 3 iPhone reviewers is a promoter, whereas for the Galaxy that number drops to 50% promoters, or only 1 out of every 2 reviewers.  From a neutral-rating perspective, both phones are very comparable, right around 19% neutral.  If we look at detractors or negative raters, we see that iPhone wins again, with only approximately 1 in 7 reviewers, or 14% leaving negative ratings, whereas with the Galaxy that number more than doubles to 1 in 3, or 32% of reviewers leaving negative detractor ratings.  

The Challenge and the Opportunity for Samsung 

Although, the iPhone maintains the lead, it creates a challenge and an opportunity for Samsung to turn detractors into promoters and either close the gap, or surpass Apple.  If Samsung could turn half of their 2-star raters (currently 20% of the reviews) into 5-star raters, it could really turn the tables and help springboard them above Apple in this category.

Stay Tuned For More Analysis 

Since star-rating is just one piece of the puzzle, I’m going to continue to dig deeper in the upcoming days into more of the data.  Review ratings indicate that iPhone 6 has the lead, but is this because of brand loyalty or the superiority of the device?  iPhone users might tend to leave high ratings, but do they leave positive or negative reviews in correlation with their high ratings?  I’ll tap into the review text, sentiment, and link the scores to the reviews topics to better understand what’s driving the review ratings to determine an answer.

Conclusion

By applying analytics to consumer reviews, we can see that the iPhone 6 beats out the Galaxy S6 based on star ratings alone.  This doesn’t necessarily mean that the iPhone 6 is better, but it appears that their users are overall substantially more satisfied than those of the Galaxy S6.  iPhone users have notoriously strong brand loyalty, and it seems to be reflected in the overall score, but is the iPhone 6 really three times better than the Galaxy S6 as the ratings suggest?