Social Media Listening Assignment:

Evan M., Kaya P., Sam M

NBA / Adidas / Nike

1) What is your research question (s)? Be sure to state as a question.

What is the overall feeling of Nike and Adidas regarding their basketball shoe line and how
much exposure is each company obtaining?

2) How did you investigate your research question? Share your methodology including what you
searched and why.

We investigated our research by creating a comparative dashboard with four different

searchers. The first search was basketball shoes, followed by basketball shoes with the
keyword search Adidas, then basketball shoes Nike and finally basketball shoes Puma. This
allowed us to view the dashboard and analyze the overall topic of basketball shoes and how the
respective companies are being talked about regarding their shoe line. Each keyword search
with a different company focused in on consumers interactions on social media to determine if
the conversation are negative or positive, and how much each company is being talked about.
The dashboard allowed for easy analysis on sentiments, share of voice, and media exposure.

3) What are your findings?

a) Did you answer your research questions? Yes or no, with supporting context.
The levels of negativity, positivity, and neutrality varied throughout the trends of each brand
regarding their lines of basketball shoes. Specifically, during the month of July, each basketball
shoe brand were very talked about through social media. This shows the dates of the shoes
being released and when NBA players would be signing new shoe deals, or updating existing
sponsorship deals. In short, we did see the trend in exposure of each brand’s shoe got on social
media comparative to one another. The graph shoes basketball shoes gaining the most
exposure on social media, followed closely by Nike. Trailing pretty far behind are Adidas and
Puma basketball shoes. This could be the cause of their basketball shoes not being popular
with the social media crowd or the fact that not many NBA stars have shoe deals with Adidas or
Puma. Adidas and Puma both lack exposure overall in the NBA since Nike is the official sponsor
of the organization. Some of Nike’s positive sentiment included consumers buying Nike due to
the brand being rebellious and sharing their beliefs. Some had no problem spending $225 on a
Nike basketball shoe because of the Kaepernick controversy. Some of the negative sentiment
for Nike included Nike not selling smaller sizes for women, or Nike’s size 15 shoe selling out too
fast. Also, the Kaepernick controversy and cheap labor was a reason for consumers not buying
Nike. Adidas had positive comments such as their shoes being comfortable. Some negative
sentiment was them being overpriced. Puma had an overall positive when it came to their
basketball shoes. The main complaint with Puma was the colors of the basketball shoes and the
fact that some consumers had trouble finding if Puma was selling their shoes online. Basketball
shoes overall had a neutral sentiment. Some negative sentiment was basketball shoes being
too big for women and pricy. Some positive sentiment was consumers being overall excited to
buy new basketball shoes. Sentiment was found on Twitter and specific tweets were saved in
tags under sports.

b) How did you develop your answer? Explain your process for searching, reviewing data, etc.

Developing an answer to the research question required analysis of the dashboard. There was
difficulty finding sentiment for basketball shoes, Nike and Adidas in one search. Much of the
searches included spam or links to buy products off shopping sites. The research had to go a
different direction which led to the different benchmarks and ultimately comparing each one.
The first step was looking at the share of voice that displays how much exposure a brand gets
among the selected topics for our research. Here it was found that most people are talking
about basketball shoes in general but are talking about Nike basketball shoes more than the
other brands’ basketball shoes (Adidas, Puma) in the search. Next, media exposure was viewed
to see how many documents and posts exist in a select time period. Once again, basketball
shoes led the conversation and Nike led the way compared to other brands’ media exposure.
The third step was to examine sentiments of each subgroup in the research to determine
whether the conversation was positive, negative or neutral regarding basketball shoes, Nike
basketball shoes, Adidas Basketball shoes, and Puma basketball shoes. This broke down the
conversation by months and found that Puma had the most positive talk about their basketball
shoes with Nike coming in second by sentiment score. All of this data combined allowed for the
analysis of the research question by reviewing how much each topic is being discussed, which
brand is receiving the most posts about them and which brand is being viewed the best by its
publics.

c) What is the answer to your research question? Please support this with examples from your
dashboard (charts, etc) and/or examples of the content your reviewed.

After doing research and seeing the trends in the results, the overall feeling of basketball shoes
in Adidas and Nike, its evident in the graphs that Nike is well more popular than Adidas. During
the time period of July 3rd through October 3rd, Nike was talked about/mentioned three times
as much as Adidas. Between the topics of ‘basketball shoes’, ‘basketball shoes nike’,
‘basketball shoes adidas’, and ‘basketball shoes puma’; Nike was mentioned 34.71% of the time
while Adidas was mentioned only 12.65%. However, while Adidas may not have been
mentioned as much as Nike, their sentiment scores over the three month period on the graph
were much higher. Their media exposure lacked signifciantly, but its positive sentiment was
significantly higher than Nike. The cause of the difference in sentiment could be anything
ranging from the quality of shoe to the difference in celebrity endorsements. The overall
sentiment comparison between Nike and Adidas were significant as well. Nike had a sentiment
of 64.2% neutral, 19.5% positive and 16.3% negative. While Adidas had a sentiment of 52.0%
neutral, 42.9% positive and 5.2% negative. This gives us an overall idea in what social media
users think regarding the overall brand of each shoe.

4) How could a business use your findings to develop their strategy? This could include --
developing ideas for new products, respond
A business could use our findings by creating a new campaign or figuring out why a basketball
shoe or brand is more popular than others. Nike had the most exposure compared to other
basketball shoe brands, but had less positive sentiment. Nike could use this information to see
what the negative sentiment is and improve upon the negative feedback to create a better
campaign. Nike’s negative sentiment included their shoes not accommodating all shoe sizes;
Nike could use this information to create better products. It’s also clear the Nike is much better
at gaining media exposure, however its not 100% effective since their sentiment score isn’t very
positive. While on the other hand, Adidas doesn’t have great media exposure while their
sentiment score was very positive. Adidas could look into focusing on the positives of their
brand and using that to create media exposure, especially since consumers have decided to not
buy Nike products due to recent events. Puma had the least media exposure, but has created
exposure recently due them selling basketball shoes. Puma could use this information to see
that consumers don’t like the colors of the shoes and then change their product. The companies
could use this information to find a happy medium behind media exposure and positive
sentiment rather than spitting out a bunch of media content and only getting a small percent of
positive sentiment.