Good entrepreneurs find information and inspiration all around them, not just in formal, topic-specific reports. There are many trends and data points out there, but what even the most entrepreneurial BigCo teams find difficult is quickly finding those consumer insights when there isn’t a budget to do so via traditional methods.
We frequently enable teams to find that consumer perspective/insight via Social Media Ethnography, which is the distillation of thousands of digital artifacts into key insights based on understanding human behavior, unmet needs, desires, and feelings as evidenced in publicly available social media data.
We’ve recently been challenging our own team to find consumer insights even quicker and more entrepreneurially, and the only way to do that is by sharpening our skills. In one effort to do so, we generated “mini” Social Media Ethnographies on trend spaces impacting BigCo clients.
These insights, for example, were generated in under 3 hours.
First Topic: Alternatives to Beer
We’ve been watching as traditional beer consumption has been declining over the past few years. Many BigCos have reacted by expanding into alternatives like wine, seltzers, etc. Even one of our local Cincinnati favorites, Braxton Brewery, is making headlines with their quick reaction to the change in consumer preferences with the launch of their Vive seltzer.
We conducted a quick, but robust, Social Media Ethnography to listen to what consumers are saying broadly about beer. We scraped publicly available social media sources from the past 6 months to gain insight into consumer sentiments about their wishes, frustrations, and delights around beer.
During our search, we found that concerns around beer have been elevated to just a heightened awareness around alcohol in general and its effects on one’s well-being – physically, mentally, and emotionally. As people continue to become more conscious of their actions and the consequences that follow, beer brands must take into consideration all of the existing alternatives – both in and out of the beverage category – and the higher-order benefits that the consumer is looking to achieve. Download the output from our research that revealed these alternatives:
Download the output by filling out the form below.
