How Does Your Brand’s Reputation On Social Media Stack Up To Competitors?

Our previous post examined a consumer brand that launched a campaign to promote their environmental commitments and an image of sustainability. Even though the campaign was mentioned often on social media, semantic network analysis showed that Sustainability existed as a separate narrative that was not a part of the brand’s core meaning. Worse, the word Sustainability was associated with words such as greenwashing and marketing claims.

Knowing how your own brand is seen by social media users is helpful. However, it doesn’t tell you how far behind you are in the competitive landscape, who’s doing it better, or where there's room to differentiate. For that, you need the same network-based approach applied to every brand in the category to make comparisons.

Extending the Methodology: Building Networks for Every Competitor

We constructed semantic networks for three competitors alongside the Client Brand (a Primary Competitor, Category Leader, and Emerging Competitor) and calculated network-based metrics to rank the most prominent associations across the landscape. The following metrics were calculated after the networks were created:

•       Centrality Scores: How do core meanings differ across brands? Which brands own associations around sustainability, and how deeply?

•       Cluster Analysis: What other meanings are associated with sustainability? How do perceptions around sustainability differ across brands?  

•       White Space Identification: Which concepts are peripheral or absent across all brand networks? These gaps represent potential differentiation opportunities if claims can be substantiated and integrated effectively.

Profiling the Competitive Landscape

Analysis produced four distinct portraits of how each brand was discussed in social media discourse during the same six-month period. Real-life laundry brands (e.g., Tide) are shown below as examples to further illustrate how networks can reveal differences in brand meaning across a competitive set.

Brand	Laundry Detergent Brand Example	Sustainability Centrality Score	Associations with Sustainability
Client Brand	Arm & Hammer: Made sustainability claims around ingredients and packaging, but their core identity is baking soda efficacy and value.	0.19 (peripheral)	Marketing campaign, Greenwashing
Primary Competitor	Seventh Generation:  Positioned plant-based formulas as effective because they're plant-based. The sustainability story and the cleaning performance story reinforce each other rather than compete.	0.44 (well-integrated)	Works, Effective, Good
Category Leader	Tide:  Semantic territory owns clean, works, reliable, and trusted. They've made limited moves into sustainability (Tide coldwater) but it's not central to their identity	0.04 (absent)	Reliability, Quality, Value, Trust
Emerging Competitor	Dropps:  Their entire brand architecture — concentrated pods, zero-plastic packaging, carbon-neutral shipping — is built from the ground up around sustainability	0.71 (core identity)	Environment, Values, Community

Primary Competitor: Sustainability as Product Improvement

The Primary Competitor was much more likely to be seen as sustainable compared to the Client Brand. Their Sustainability centrality score (0.44) was more than double the client’s, reflecting successful brand integration. Comparing the words associated with Sustainability between both brands was also revealing. While Sustainability was associated with skeptical concepts for the Client Brand network, product quality was highly connected to Sustainability for the Primary Competitor. This shows that Sustainability wasn’t an ethical add-on to an existing product story, but viewed as evidence of product advancement. Overall, social media users discussed the Primary Competitor's environmental attributes along with performance attributes and lacked the greenwashing skepticism that dominated the Client Brand’s network.

Category Leader: Owning Table Stake Attributes Without Sustainability

The Category Leader presented a structurally different case. Sustainability was almost entirely absent from their network (centrality of 0.04). This is likely due to the brand’s lack of initiative to enter that territory. The network shows that the Category Leader had built deep, integrated meaning around a defined set of associations around reliability, quality, value, and trust. However, Sustainability is not a part of their brand meaning, showing that emphasizing environmental efforts is a promising way to differentiate in the landscape.

Emerging Competitor: Sustainability as Brand Foundation

The Emerging Competitor represented the most structurally distinctive case in the competitive set. With a Sustainability centrality score of 0.71, Sustainability was not just well-integrated into their brand meaning: it was the foundation around which all other meaning organized. The network showed a single, unified cluster in which environmental impact, brand values, and community associations are all interconnected.

The contrast with the Client Brand is stark. Both brands were discussing sustainability during the same period on the same social media platforms. Yet the Emerging Competitor's sustainability messaging activated no skeptical framing because skepticism is triggered by claims that feel disconnected from identity. This doesn’t mean the Client Brand needs to reposition as an environmental brand. However, the client should adopt messaging strategies from the emerging competitor to better integrate Sustainability into brand meaning.

The Cross-Competitive Finding: Integration Is the Variable That Matters

Reading the four brand profiles together produces insights that transcend any individual brand’s situation. The Category Leader owned no sustainability associations and showed no structural weakness. The Emerging Competitor owned sustainability as its core identity. The Primary Competitor had successfully integrated sustainability into existing functional positioning. All three represented different brand meanings. In contrast, the Client Brand had created a second narrative alongside the brand’s core meaning, rather than reshaping the core meaning itself.

There are two approaches the client can take to leverage the findings from the competitive analysis. One is to adopt messaging tactics from the primary and emerging competitors to integrate Sustainability into their brand's core meaning. Another is to identify gaps in the current landscape to create new messaging that differentiates the client from the competition.

White Space Analysis: Where the Competitive Landscape Has Room

Beyond comparing existing brand structures, competitive network analysis also identifies the semantic territory that no brand has claimed. By examining which concepts are peripheral or absent across all brand networks simultaneously, this analysis reveals potential opportunities to stand out in the competitive landscape.

Example - Transparency

Concepts like open, honest, show, and prove were peripheral across all four brand networks. In a product category experiencing skepticism about sustainability claims, radical transparency represented an unclaimed response to the dominant consumer concern. No brand in the competitive set was building meaning around demonstrating rather than claiming.

Strategic opportunity: A brand that made evidence and verification central to its positioning could differentiate by addressing skepticism structurally rather than rhetorically. Not "trust us, we’re sustainable" but "here’s exactly what we do and how you can verify it."

Conclusion: Knowing How Brand Meaning Differs Across Competitors Is an Asset

Semantic network analysis dives deeper into brand meaning and reveals insights that are often overlooked using traditional metrics (e.g., awareness scores). These findings can show nuance across a competitive set and identify unclaimed semantic territory that a brand can move into and stand out. For the client brand in this case, the competitive read confirmed that the strategic problem was real and specific, but also that it was fixable. The path to integration was visible in the primary competitor’s playbook and the White Space analysis suggested routes to differentiation that no competitor had claimed.

Most brands monitor competitors through awareness tracking, share of voice, and attribute ratings. Semantic network analysis adds a dimension that those metrics don’t capture: the structure of meaning that determines whether positioning is working, where the competitive landscape has room, and what it would actually take to own a territory rather than just mention it.

Learn More

This post is the second in a series extending the brand positioning case study introduced in our recent post “How Semantic Networks Can Reveal Why a Social Media Campaign Wasn’t Working.” The data is illustrative and draws on the methodology described in HDI’s white paper on semantic networks. The same competitive analysis approach applies across consumer and B2B categories, brand repositioning, messaging strategy, and portfolio architecture decisions.

Visit hauptdatainsights.com or contact Michael@hauptdatainsights.com to discuss how semantic network analysis can provide a quantitative foundation for your brand strategy decisions.