DeWalt vs. Milwaukee Sentiment Analysis
Introduction
I work in maintenance. More specifically, the maintenance/engineering department of a food manufacturing plant. Among the mechanics there is an ongoing debate about who the best power tool manufacturer is. The most common manufacturers mentioned are Milwaukee and DeWalt. This a common debate among skilled labor across several different industries. Several years ago, when I wired homes, this was a common point of conversation among the team (50% used Milwaukee and 50% used DeWalt). This is also a debate among homeowners/DIYers. As a homeowner, I use DeWalt (hold over from my days wiring houses), whereas my father uses Milwaukee (he got it as a Christmas gift and never looked back).
In order to understand which brand may be prevailing among customers (professionals and DIYers, alike), I collected twitter data covering 29 October 2021 to 6 November 2021 in R using the rtweet package. I scraped tweets that mentioned @DEWALTtough and @MilwaukeeTool and the search yielded 347 tweets mentioning DeWalt and 148 tweets mentioning Milwaukee.
Bing Analysis
For the first analysis of the tweets, I used the Bing sentiment lexicon.
Bing Analysis
I have plotted below the entirety of the sentiment analysis. It is tough to read, but it shows the distribution of positive and negative words for the two companies. The result shows that DeWalt has a more even distribution of unique positive and negative words while Milwaukee has more unique positive words than negative.
Bing Analysis (sample)
This is the same analysis as the previous chart but using a slice_head to show a sample of the positive and negative words that is easier to read.
NRC Analysis
Using the NRC Emotional Lexicon, I looked at the emotional sentiments used in tweeting about the two brands. The result shows DeWalt being consistent across the “trust”, “negative”, “joy”, and “anger” emotions. But they outperformed with the positive emotion compared to the others. Milwaukee had a similar result but at a lower count due to having less than half the number of tweets. Considering the variance in the number of tweets, I found it interesting that both companies have almost the same number of “trust” words.
NRC Analysis
Week Day Analysis
The below graphs are analysis of the tweets and emotions in relation to day of the week.
Tweet by Week Day
The distribution of tweets by day of the week shows Friday and Saturday as being the most common day for both companies to be tweeted at. There is a huge increase on these days for DeWalt especially, whereas Milwaukee has a minor increase. I believe this may indicate that DeWalt is favored by a homeowner/DIYer because the weekend is when home projects are typically done.
Sentimate by Week Day
This plot looks at negative and positive sentiments per day of the week. DeWalt sees and increase in positive sentiments on Friday and an increase of both positive and negative sentiments on Saturday. Milwaukee saw its most positive tweets fall on Tuesday followed closely by Friday and then Thursday. I believe this is another indication of the homeowner/DIYer preferring DeWalt and may indicate that professionals tend to prefer Milwaukee.
