Ibanez vs Fender

Introduciton of the data

Ibanez and Fender are generally recognized as some of the best brands in music when it comes to electric guitars. I am interested in purchasing a new guitar for myself soon and want to understand more about the guitar community’s view on both companies as a whole. I had a few questions in particular, and below are those questions and what answers I found while searching.

Details of the dataset

All the data below is pulled off twitter using a Twitter bot. While I was unable to dish out thousands and thousands of dollars to get a holistic view of both Twitter accounts, I did get access to 200 instances, each mentioning the Twitter handles of both accounts.

What is their most retweeted post?

I thought this was an excellent question because it would give me insight into what the communities of both companies value. To answer this question, I went and pulled 200 results from each Twitter handle and ordered the entire list in descending order. From there, I sliced the data only to show the top re-tweeted post of the sample data I collected. This will display the most re-tweeted bar, including the handle of each business. Based on each text, I can deduce if it is an ad or an original post.

Ibanez

Based off of this tweet it seems that the Ibanez community puts a high emphasis on the beauty of the guitar

text	retweet_count
Steve with his new main guitar the @ibanezofficial ONYX PIA.
📸: Larry DiMarzio https://t.co/OcrZqX9U1Y	107

Fender

This tweet is a happy birthday tweet to a famous guitar player with an accompanying image that shows his vintage guitar.

text	retweet_count
This trio of ’60s reliced Sparkle Strats comes from Vince Van Trigt. Drop your favorite down below! https://t.co/UA45Vzy6od	53

Based on the data I was able to pull, it appears that just from the most retweeted image, I can cautiously assume that the fender community puts a higher value on the guitar and the player together. At the same time, Ibanez seems to be more of the new guitar brand on the block, pushing a higher emphasis on the beauty of the instrument by accenting the colors of it with a similar background.

What Words Have Been Most Frequently Said?

I was interested to see what words were most frequently used in tandem with the handles of each respective company. I thought it might be able to give insight into what popular topics are discussed regarding each company. I first picked out each individual word in the text column and then removed stop words such as “a the, is, are, etc…” to only show words of interest. From there, I counted the number of instances each word was mentioned. I saw there were quite a few stop words I missed, so I manually filtered out “HTTPS, t.co, I’ve, em, and the name of the company.” I was left with a complete list of words and the number of times they appeared in tweets. Check out the top 10 words of each below!

Ibanez Most Frequent Words

Based on the graphs below, the Ibanez fans seem to talk more frequently about different types of guitar models, such as the grg121sp, grg22pa, and the btb605ms. It also appears that there are a few instances talking about a sponsored guitar player Kenji Koch and their newest guitar release. It seems that based on this, they focus primarily on the guitars as their own models and want to highlight the differences between them. Below is a searchable table of the most common words.

Fender Most Frquent Words

Fender on the other hand seems to have a more similar count from word to word which lead us to assume that this is a sort of advertisement on their twitter page. These words seem to focus more on the nature of the brand rather the player or the single instrument. Not the most interesting answers I was looking for but it was still helpful to learn about. Also below is another searchable list of all the words used and the number of times they were used.

What are the people saying?

I was intrigued by my findings but wanted to know more about the fan base. So in order to do that, I performed a sentiment analysis on both companies’ Twitter accounts to see if, overall, they had more negative or positive words used on their page. I did this by installing the bing sentiment package to check whether terms were considered to have a positive or negative connotation with them. The difficulty with this, as you will soon see, is that guitarists enjoy the struggle that comes with learning the instrument, so words like complex and challenging can be misleading as far as the overall tone of the brand. Those words have nothing to do with the instruments or the brand but pertain to the material they are playing on the instruments.

Ibanez Word Cloud/ Sentiment Data

Based on the data below, we can see that overall, Ibanez has a lot more positive words used than negative words. The word win appears 109 times which indicates to me that there might be some sort of exciting finding related to the word.

Fender Word Cloud/ Sentiment Analysis

Compared to Ibanez, Fender has a much evener split between their positive and negative sentiment. But after a second look, we can see words such as “wild, frets, and smoke” appear to be negative words. Wild and Smoke could be words in the tiles of songs commonly talked about by people in the Fender communities IE: Smoke on the water. What word stands out to me the most is Limited. To me, this could be signifying a negative connotation toward fender products. I am interested in finding out more about this to see if there is any truth to this.

During what time of day do we see the most twitter activity from these companies?

I was interested in seeing if, depending on how the day progressed, there would be an increase or decrease in the overall sentiment score of each business. So in order to find out how the sentiment towards the companies changes throughout the day, I compared the overall number of positive and negative words by each hour of the day by using a histogram graph to display the findings of both positive and negative sentiment.

Fender Positive Words By The Hour

The fender community uses a higher positive sentiment than negative, but we also do see that the negative words seem to appear simultaneously as the positive sentiment. Unfortunately, it is not the most exciting data.

Ibanez Positive Words By Hour

Ibanez, on the other hand, had some more interesting data. It seems that overall the text is semi-positive in the morning, less so during mid-day, and finally, we see a significant rise in the number of positive words used in the evening. Negative words, on the other hand, are far fewer in number and seem to appear more often in the morning hours than later in the day.

Conclusion

While the information above was intriguing to some extent, I can’t say. It helped me in my decision process to buy a new guitar. The sentiment analysis did not give me the answers I was looking for, and I am still unsure which brand to buy from. Hopefully, in a later project, I will be able to find better answers to my questions.