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Here at Black Swan Data, we are proud to be recognised as a Twitter Official Partner. The Official Partner badge is awarded to a handful of select companies who have been independently evaluated as best-in-breed solutions, which in our case is using social intelligence to anticipate and predict consumer behaviour for marketing and innovation strategy. Beyond the stamp of endorsement of the Twitter badge, as a Partner we also get to work together on cool projects like their Birdseye report a series of ground-breaking studies that unearths the trends driving conversation across multiple categories, one of which is Alcoholic Beverages. In this post, we’ll give you a taster of some of our key findings. What we found As with all our reports, we’ve used our TRENDSCOPE SaaS platform to analyse millions of publicly available consumer conversations around the consumption of Alcohol to identify three key trends that are driving the conversation, and by extension, consumer preferences in this fast-changing category. Healthier Drinking? 11% more consumers say “Yes”. Non-alcoholic beverages are getting an upgrade. More people are exploring the Low and No Alcohol space, looking to drink cleanly and avoid the effects of alcoholic beverages. This is also driving preferences towards plant-based ingredients like Lychee, Grapefruit or Orange, as we saw from an 11% increase in the conversation around healthy ingredients over the past couple of years. More than one in ten switch to the canned Piña Colada. Making it easy. With a 12% YoY change for the period of September 2020-21 versus the same period between 2019 and 2020, is is clear thatafter two years of lockdowns and increasing time spent at home, consumers have turned to recreating the taste experience they would normally receive at a restaurant or a bar using ready-to-drink options. This is partly because of the convenience these formats offer, as well as continued supply issues that have made getting access to ingredients to make your own cocktail at home restricted. American brands and products see 33% increase in conversations. Beyond the comfort zone. Tired of the same old? Evidently, with a 24% increase in conversations around this topic. Consumers are expanding their alcohol choices and are looking for international drinks and brands that are authentic with interesting product stories. Consumers are increasingly discussing trying new European and Asian offerings as well as artisanal, local American brands and breweries – especially when it comes to Low & No options. Another area of growth is the curiosity around influencer-led brands and the increasing role celebrity figureheads are playing in driving trial and preference. Overall, […]

Many large CPG firms are struggling to innovate fast enough, and this is leading some to experiment with different business models and different ways to get things through their large systems. The cry of ‘be Agile!’ can be heard in many corporate offices, and with this push to be more agile it could be easy to think that stage gate processes should be abolished altogether.   

Since the beginning of market research in the early 1900’s, companies have been trying to understand the needs of their customers, find ways of improving their products, and validate new ideas before spending large amounts of money developing them.