CONTENTS.INTRODUCTION

1. INDUSTRY OVERVIEW

i. Media Breakdown

2. BEER INDUSTRY TRENDS

i. Overview: Craft Beer

ii. Overview: Domestic Beer

iii. Overview: Imported Beer

3. WINE INDUSTRY TRENDS

i. Overview: Red Wine

ii. Overview: White Wine

iii. Overview: Rosé Wine

4. HARD LIQUOR INDUSTRY TRENDS

i. Overview: Vodka

ii. Overview: Whiskey

iii. Overview: Tequila

iv. Overview: Rum

v. Overview: Gin

CONCLUSION

INTRODUCTION

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The global alcoholic beverages market was valued at $1,344 billion in 2015, and is projected to reach $1,594 billion by 2022. And the US contributes a large quantity to this revenue, with more than 7.7 billion gallons of alcoholic beverages consumed in 2016. With the sheer magnitude of opportunity in this industry, marketers must remain competitive on all platforms in order to keep up with growing consumer demands.

In the case of wine and beer, the rise in homegrown breweries and wineries around the country has created a deep culture of not only consuming alcohol, but also supporting American-made brands as well as locally-sourced products.

The alcohol industry and social media have a deeply natural connection to each other due to their typical target consumer: millennials. In fact, alcohol brands have even spurred from social media influencers. Instagram superstar Josh Ostrovsky, who many know as @TheFatJewish, took his millennial influence and love of wine to create White Girl Rosé. Since the summer of 2015, Ostrovsky and team have sold more than 30,000 cases of the label's signature rosé and Babe sparkling wine. This was thanks to the social component with alcohol consumption- perfectly aligning with Ostrovsky’s social network following.

With the use of any one of the numerous social media platforms, one complaint to a few friends or followers can be discovered and amplified, reaching a huge viral audience and damaging brand reputations with the click of a button. Making necessary changes and committing to enhancing social media presence can provide invaluable benefits to an alcohol brand.

Using social insights, alcohol brands can also do more than just monitor their own brand reputation; they can understand competitors, find key messages to build advertising campaigns, develop new products, and understand where and how consumers are engaging with their products.

For this study, we assessed general alcohol market trends as well as user interactions with US and Canadian alcohol companies on social media in the following industries from November 20, 2017 to December 4, 2017:● Beer: Domestic, Imported, and Craft● Wine: Red, White, and Rosé● Hard Liquor: Vodka, Tequila, Rum, Whiskey, and Gin

To begin analyzing the alcohol industry, we broke down the market into three major categories: beer, wine, and hard liquor. Beer made up the majority of discussion surrounding the alcohol industry with a 46% share of voice in terms of volume of mentions, followed by wine at 43%, and hard liquor at 11%. To understand common areas of discussion surrounding the alcohol industry, the top 40 most commonly mentioned keywords were pulled as well. With the holidays occurring soon after this data was analyzed, “Christmas” and “December” are among the most popularly discussed topics related to alcohol.

Industry Overview

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Finally, we performed a sentiment analysis for each major subsection of the industry. All three subsections had a majority of positive sentiment by volume of mentions, with hard liquor holding the highest percentage of negative mentions at 25%. This may not come as a surprise, especially given the positive terms occurring in the analysis of top keywords - happy, friends, and holiday, for example. Alcohol is strongly associated with celebration, especially during the holidays.

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Media Breakdown

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Over the course of the data collection period, the vast majority of conversation occurred on Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter, accounting for 96% of total online conversations. It may come as a surprise that Twitter was placed third. Generally, Twitter tends to take the largest share of voice due to the fact that the platform simplifies direct interaction with brands, and for brands to respond to the comments and questions of their customers.

The lower pie chart compares social platforms in terms of total audience size, or reach, as opposed to volume of mentions. By this metric, Facebook takes a much larger share of voice with an audience potential of 4539 million, versus Twitter’s 414 million. Many of Facebook’s top mentions included posts from major outlets and celebrities - Dwayne Johnson, for example had a number of Facebook posts mentioning tequila over the data collection period.

Digimind’s proprietary Estimated Reach metric provides a more accurate estimation of how many people actually saw these posts when compared to traditional audience reach calculations. Facebook received a estimated reach of 13 million. Facebook was, in fact, the only social channel to reach over one million users, despite of all of the platforms’ massive audience potential.

Media Breakdown by Total Audience Reach

Media Breakdown by Number of Mentions

Overview: Beer

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The most striking finding about the share of voice within the beer industry is the large volume of mentions for craft beers compared to domestic and imported, which accounted for 97% of online conversation with 30,273 mentions. The increasingly popular culture surrounding craft beers is helpful in explaining the breakdown. In fact, craft beer was the number one most mentioned topic throughout the entire alcohol industry, followed by other craft beer-related keywords and hashtags including #instabeer and breweries.

We looked into the top cities for beer mentions to geographically analyze interest in craft beers. As one might expect, many cities often characterized as trendy - Toronto, New York, Portland, San Diego, and Denver, for example, were among the top 10 cities where craft beer was commonly mentioned.

Another notable factor in the skew towards craft beers is the rise of Untappd, a geosocial networking platform for beer lovers to share and rate the beers they’re enjoying - the app accounted for 929 of the total mentions of craft beer.

Overview: Craft Beer

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A large volume of online conversation about craft beers involved the beer-focused social platform, Untappd. The platform enables users to comment on, share, and rate beers as they enjoy them.

When looking into the key concept for each of the four highlighted craft beer brands, we saw that Untappd’s check-in comment feature was among the top-trending concepts for Sierra Nevada, Boston Beer Co., and Yuengling.

With the ever-growing popularity of craft beer culture, breweries should promote their beers on this industry-specific social platform, and engage with Untapped users who are posting about their beers on social media.

Overview: Domestic Beer

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Influencer marketing strategies, specifically sponsorships, are incredibly lucrative opportunities for alcohol brands. For example, Budweiser’s “Moment of the Week” campaign with the LA Lakers sponsors the top plays and highlights from the team’s season. According to Digimind’s Estimated Reach metric, this single tweet was seen by over 25,700 users, offering Budweiser a huge boost in brand visibility.

Share-of-voice distribution was mostly even among the domestic beer industry, with Coors Light and Budweiser taking the largest shares of voice at 30% each. As one might expect from an analysis of the domestic beer sector, the sports industry played a huge role in online conversation. An influencer identification analysis placed the NFL at the top of the list. The NFL has over 24 million followers on Twitter alone - about nine million more than the second most influential media outlet in this conversation space, The Wall Street Journal.

Overview: Imported Beer

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In the conversations around imported beers, most striking is Dos Equis’ very small share of voice relative to other brands. To help explain this, we looked into the share of followers (bottom left) and share of interactions (bottom right) across the brands’ social media channels. Dos Equis had the second largest share of social media followers with 4.29 million subscribers across Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and Instagram, beaten only by Heineken’s massive following of 23.94 million.

However, Dos Equis had the smallest levels of engagement across the period of data collection with a 3% share of voice. Interestingly, Corona earned 50,450 interactions over the period of data collection - correlating to their top share of voice by volume of mentions at 43%, despite having far fewer subscribers (2.2 million) than Heineken and Dos Equis. The data proves that community size isn’t everything - actively engaging with consumers and followers across social media is far more important for increasing engagement and visibility.

Share of Total Followers Share of Total Interactions

Overview: Wine

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Share of voice among wine categories was far more evenly distributed than among beer types. However, red wine made up the majority of conversation around the wine industry. This may have to do with consumer preferences - red wine may be more popular in the winter while white dominates the summer season, as an extended study on seasonal consumer preferences might reveal.

The popularity of mulled wine during this collection period seems to support this theory. The number of mentions of mulled wine totaled 2,039, accounting for 6.2% of the total conversation around the wine industry. Most striking about this data is that mulled wine was discussed more than the entire category of rosé wine, which received 1,889 mentions, accounting for 5.7% of conversation in the wine industry.

This data highlights an excellent opportunity for red wine brands: leveraging the seasonal popularity of mulled wine could be incredibly helpful for marketing a particular wine brand as a holiday cocktail and increasing Q4 sales.

Overview: Red Wine

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Apothic Red made up the majority of online conversation among this sample of red wine brands. In analyzing this trend, it became clear that the skew towards Apothic Red could be attributed to the photo contest the brand ran during the data collection period. Followers of Apothic Red were encouraged to post of themselves enjoying the wine with the hashtag #ApothicReverlyContest. Though Apothic Red only had 12 posts, the post announcing the photo contest received over 10,000 interactions.

Although Apothic Red was beaten out by Casillero del Diablo in terms of community size, Apothic’s engaging content enabled them to beat out their competitors in number of interactions by a large margin. Engaging with social media followers is equally, if not more important than gaining followers in a successful social media strategy. In a culture where keeping the attention of consumers is often more difficult than acquiring it, engaging social content is what creates results.

Overview: White Wine

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Barefoot Pinot Grigio had the largest share of voice in conversations about white wines, making up 52% of the total volume of mentions. As a wine sold in nearly all liquor stores, this may not come as a surprise. However, data collected from a demographic analysis of the industry offered noteworthy insights.

While many people believe that white wine tends to be consumed by women more often than men, a demographic report of the conversation space for white wine revealed that men discussed white wine more often than women. While the margin was not incredibly large - 57% of mentions were made by males - it provides an interesting statistic nonetheless. Regardless of cultural perception, there remains a strong market for white wines for both genders.

Also, a large portion of both men and women over the age of 55 were discussing white wine online during this data collection period. As much as 41% of the conversation had by men regarding white wine was comprised of users over 55, and as much as 19% for women.

Overview: Rosé Wine

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The distribution of conversation with the market for rosé was skewed towards Summer Water Wine, which made up 55% of conversation - followed by Ruffino at 20%, Justin Winery at 18%, and finally White Girl Rosé with 7% share of voice.When looking at the individual mentions that Summer Water Wine received, it became apparent that the majority of mentions received by the brand were part of a promotional campaign launched by the wine brand’s distributor, Winc. Winc Wine Club is a subscription service which allows members to shop for wine online, suggests wines according to their preferences, and delivers the wine to their door on a monthly basis.

During the period of data collection, Winc ran a promotional campaign which gave a $20 discount code for current members to share with their friends. This is a perfect example of how brands can understand distributor promotions and other tactics that may be driving sales for themselves and their competitors.

Overview: Hard Liquor

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Between all three types of alcohol: beer, wine, and hard liquor, hard liquor had the most evenly distributed share of voice. This is largely due to the fact that type of liquor is a slightly broader categorization than used for beers and wines.

For this reason, each category of hard liquor received a larger volume of mentions across the board, including mentions from major media outlets, which offer huge audience potential to these subsections. The second chart represents size of the total audience of all mentions. This illustrates that all types of hard alcohol had huge potential audience reach metrics. Audience potentials ranged from whiskey, which had the largest potential audience of 904 million to tequila, which had the smallest potential audience of 484 million.

Share of Voice by Volume of Mentions

Share of Voice by Total Audience Reach

Overview: Vodka

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Since the holidays were a trending topic within the alcohol industry, we created a list of tags for common holiday cocktail ingredients. Among the data surrounding these tags was the Smirnoff’s brand presence within the tag for peppermint. In fact, ‘Smirnoff Peppermint’ was the second most commonly mentioned term associated with this tag. With a social intelligence tool, brands like Smirnoff can discover and take action on valuable brand associations similar to this.

Smirnoff did in fact tweet about their product’s association with the holidays, promoting their Peppermint Twist vodka.

Recognition of trending brand associations is important for creating timely promotions to reach consumers when they are most receptive to a particular brand, as evidenced here.

Overview: Whiskey

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The share of voice between Jack Daniel’s and Jim Beam was highly skewed in Jack Daniel’s favor. One notable factor contributing to this was Jack Daniel’s presence as an ingredient in the kitchen. Many prominent food blogs were posting about using Jack Daniel’s whiskey in their cooking. The Stay at Home Chef, a blog with over 2 million followers on Facebook, posted a macaroni and cheese recipe featuring Jack Daniel’s whiskey. This insight represents a useful piece of competitive benchmarking data for Jim Beam.

Jack Daniel’s high brand visibility in the realm of online cooking blogs demonstrates a great opportunity to gain visibility among food bloggers and vloggers’ massive audiences. A gesture as simple as sending a complimentary bottle of whiskey to one of these influencers might earn Jack Daniel’s or Jim Beam a new brand ambassador.

When searching for the keyword ‘recipe’ among mentions of these two whiskey brands, Jack Daniel’s received 43 mentions while Jim Beam only received one. That’s a 98% share of voice advantage for Jack Daniel’s among this audience. These earned media posts included a CBS article with an audience reach of over 3 million. In contrast, Jim Bean’s single post had an audience potential of 391 people. The value of earned media in generating brand visibility is apparent given these figures.

Overview: Tequila

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Jose Cuervo took the majority of the share of voice from Patrón for the entire duration of the data collection period, making up for 76% of online conversation with 2,682 mentions versus Patrón’s 688. There were numerous peaks in volume of mentions across the data collection period. However, Patrón continuously experienced a relatively small share of voice for the entire period.

Among the possible explanations for Jose Cuervo’s larger share of voice was that Jose Cuervo was consistently mentioned in lists of the top ads of 2017 for their ad entitled “Last Days.”

The advertisement uses an apocalypse scenario as a stand-in metaphor for living in the moment, as a group of bar-goers stay inside, dancing and drinking as the world around them is destroyed. As the ad closes, the tagline “Tomorrow is Overrated” reads on a neon bar sign hanging over a bottle of Jose Cuervo and two shot glasses.

Overview: Rum

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Bacardi and Captain Morgan received a relatively even distribution in terms of share of voice for the rum industry, but Bacardi took the majority with 61% of the volume of mentions. This can be attributed to Bacardi’s launch of their successful “Sound of Rum” campaign. The campaign featured a partnership with music group Major Lazer, who states that Carribean music inspires their sound. The campaign focuses on the concept of what rum would sound like if put to music and consisted of a series of advertisements featuring Caribbean music and culture. Jamaican singer Sean Paul supported the ads, encouraging his fans to check the series out on Facebook where he has more than 11 million followers.

Overview: Gin

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The campaign was among the top ten concepts associated with Bombay Sapphire, and received 33 mentions across social media and various Australian culture sites such as The City Lane and Melbourne Cocktails. Tracking online mentions and news coverage of a sponsored event like this is an effective way for brands to measure ROI of offline events which is notoriously difficult to measure.

Share of voice regarding these two gin brands was the most evenly distributed among all of the hard liquor brands. Bombay Sapphire and Tanqueray each made up 50% of the conversation.

An Australian event campaign known as Project Botanicals was a trending topic in relation to Bombay Sapphire. The brand sponsored an event in Sydney and Melbourne which offered gin lovers the opportunity to experience an immersive evening of food, cocktails, and creative technology, according to the campaign site.

The success of the campaign in Australia, and volume of online conversations that it generated is promising for Bombay Sapphire. Many of the attendees posted on Instagram and Twitter using the official hashtag of the event as well, which demonstrates potential for Bombay Sapphire to incorporate this campaign into more of their digital marketing strategies as well. This information might encourage alcohol brands like Bombay Sapphire to host more of these events globally in the United States and Europe.

CONCLUSION

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As shown through the Digimind Social analysis, the social nature behind alcohol consumption in North America creates a strong correlation between social media insights and effective business strategies. Savvy alcohol brands, whether within the beer, hard liquor, or wine sectors, know that strong social media strategies centered around core audience demographics will correlate to strong sales. And the key to making effective social media marketing strategies is listening to the consumer through social listening. Social listening can not only influence marketing strategies, but also have influence on other areas of a business including research and development.

Listening to, analyzing, and reporting on social media data benefits more than just an alcohol organizations’ marketing and communications departments. Areas across the business are able to use the knowledge discovered through social media listening to accelerate and inform business decisions. Among its many uses, social intelligence enables brands to:

● Anticipate trends● Analyze consumer insights● Develop well-targeted content strategies● Perform comprehensive competitor analysis● Penetrate new markets with influencer marketing● Increase sales with social data

With an insight-driven marketing approach, social listening and analysis is a powerful tool for alcohol brands to head in a highly competitive, consumer-driven industry.

Want to know how Digimind can help you stay ahead of competition in your

industry using social intelligence?

Contact Us!

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Digimind is the leading social listening and intelligence software, designed for brands and agencies who want to accelerate digital transformation through an insights-driven approach. Recognized by Forrester and Gartner, Digimind’s best-in-class technology transforms social and online data into actionable business insights, enabling marketers to effectively plan, execute, and analyze their marketing strategy.

Founded in 1998, Digimind has offices in New York, Paris, Singapore, and Rabat, serving more than 600 customers worldwide, including LinkedIn, Sony, McCann Worldwide, and Lexus.

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2018

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