The editor recently heard that Xiaomi and Honor, two competing internet smartphone brands, dissed each other in a round and have created a lot of buzz on online media. The editor is curious, whose phones are actually better? This is a difficult question to answer. Look at reviews? They are often biased paid articles. Sample the opinions of people around you? The sample size is too small to be scientific. The editor found an earth-shattering method, directly using massive amounts of e-commerce reviews for statistics. Although there are fabricated reviews on every platform, generally speaking, these fake reviews occur in the early stages of product release. Once the volume of reviews increases, the faked ones basically drown out as noise.
The editor exported 1.6 million product review texts from JD.com for December 2018, which belong to both Honor and Xiaomi brands (try brushing up a million reviews yourself), and combined with the AI technology of our tech guys, conducted Aspect extraction and sentiment analysis on a random sample of 100,000 review texts. This study does not differentiate between models, only analyzing the overall brand evaluation.
After being tagged by AI, the aspects and sentiments generally look like the following (only 10 entries are excerpted as examples). Subsequently, the editor conducts a comparative analysis of this 100,000-entry dataset.
After discarding the majority of overly generalized review texts, the editors analyzed the proportion of comment counts in the following aspects against the brand's total number of comments, yielding data that can be used for brand comparison. As can be seen, Xiaomi is quite strong in the aspect of "cost-performance" with 10.96% of Xiaomi reviews affirming its value for money, while 9.36% of Honor reviews affirm its cost-performance. Additionally, Honor has a relatively significant advantage in terms like "screen" and "appearance." Meanwhile, Xiaomi shows more distinct advantages in aspects like "photography," "cost-performance," and "price."
Then we use negative reviews as validation. Xiaomi received a lot of complaints regarding "Battery", with a fair amount of grievances about the "Screen" and "Design" as well. On the other hand, Honor does not have particularly noticeable issues.
To Facilitate Comparison For Each Project, The Editor Has Recreated Several Charts According to the Projects:
From the perspective of "Speed", the two brands are neck and neck, ending in a tie.
From the perspective of cost-effectiveness, Xiaomi has received more positive feedback but also more negative feedback. However, considering the much larger number of positive feedback samples, the confidence level is higher. Therefore, the editor tentatively and subjectively believes that Xiaomi wins in terms of cost-effectiveness.
Regarding the screen, the positive and negative reviews corroborate each other, with Honor coming out ahead.
Regarding price, the editor believes it should be closely related to the cost-performance ratio and can corroborate each other; hence Xiaomi takes the victory
In terms of photography, Xiaomi received more positive evaluations and fewer negative evaluations, Xiaomi wins out. This is a bit different from the editor's intuition; the editor has always thought that Huawei's technology should be a bit better, but Honor needs to distinguish itself from the Huawei main series, so making some compromises in certain areas is inevitable.
Tactile feel is a rather abstract concept, yet a significant number of consumers have mentioned it. Both companies are neck and neck in this aspect.
In terms of appearance, Honor has more positive reviews and fewer negative ones, coming out on top.
In terms of colors, Honor takes the win. Colors should have strong relevance to the appearance and can validate each other.
Regarding the battery, both brands have similar positive reviews, but Xiaomi has significantly more negative sentiment. Based on the editor’s own painful experience, it is not fair to comment on Honor as I have never used it, but Xiaomi's battery is really...
In terms of packaging, Honor receives more positive feedback. Coupled with Xiaomi's setback in design and color, one might wonder if there has been a misstep in their design strategy?
To Summarize:
Tie: Speed, Hand-feel
Xiaomi Wins: Cost-effectiveness, Price, Photography
Honor Wins: Screen, Appearance, Color, Battery, Packaging
After the new products from both companies are launched, I will conduct a comparative analysis of the new models separately.
