Love it or hate it, Valentine’s Day is almost upon us. For brands, every celebrated date on the calendar is an opportunity to engage with consumers who might be in the market for your goods or services. This particular occasion is generally associated with flowers, cards, candy, jewelry, and candlelight dinners (or in my case, a takeaway for one at home!).
Given the year that was 2020 and the pandemic which has followed us into 2021, brands know that they have to be very careful with their messaging this Valentine’s Day. Ad copy that was charming in any other year could be viewed differently amongst the economic and human devastation in COIVD-19’s wake. For example, following in the footsteps of UK florist Bloom & Wild, many brands are already actively offering consumers the opportunity to opt-out of all Valentine communications.
But, it’s not all doom and gloom. A survey by the National Retail Foundation forecasts that consumers will spend an average of $196.31 this Valentine’s Day – an increase of 21% over last year’s previous record of $161.96. Total consumer spending for the romantic holiday is expected to total $27.4 billion, up 32% from 2020.
Brands can cozy up to consumers on Valentine’s Day with the right analytics
The Market Overviews featured in the Skai platform provide a holistic ecosystem view of trends, category interactions, macro drivers, and brand positioning for key industry categories. The advanced analytics within these Overviews reveal new opportunities for brands, offering inspiration from across the ecosystem and create unique and disruptive innovations that are well-positioned for success.
The Food Market Overview leverages a highly detailed and curated taxonomy, spanning multiple product attributes that are key to this industry including Solution Type, Benefit, Feature, Ingredient, Texture, Nutrient, Flavor, Taste across 21 food categories. The data analyzed includes more than 800,000 products, nearly 100 million consumer discussions, 700,000 key opinion leader posts, five million product reviews, and 200,000 patent filings, important for cross-category and macro trend analyses like Valentine’s Day that can affect multiple cross-sections of the industry.
Let’s see what trends we found!
Some think Valentine’s Day is cheesy—and it might even be cheesier this year
It’s no surprise that chocolate is a highly talked about food group at this time of year. But the data also shows that for the first time, the number of conversations related to the Dairy category takes the lead for most talked about in relation to Valentine’s Day. Cheese is the most desired food type within the dairy category as social media conversations have increased by 173% over the last 12 months alone.
Interestingly, however, there has only been a 5% increase in cheese related products over the last 12 months. This may be an under-addressed opportunity that brands may want to take advantage of with their marketing efforts.
A new texture is bubbling to the top of consumer discussions this year
After a year of eating healthy and focusing on nutrition during the pandemic, consumers will use Valentine’s Day this year as an excuse to indulge. The data show that bubbly—specifically, the term Effervescent —drinks will be in high demand.
Whilst it’s unsurprising that Effervescent is in the top 5 most sought after textures by consumers in the non-alcoholic drinks category this Valentine’s Day, it has also broken into the Top 5 most discussed textures in the food category too.
Despite the consumer buzz around this texture, Effervescent is not something that many products right now are actually claiming—with Smooth and Creamy taking the top spot in terms of textures within product claims. This suggests there is an opportunity here for brands to fill an unmet market need!
Valentine’s Day will be less sweet with consumers this year? If you only do social listening, you will miss the reality
Consumer discussions around Valentine’s Day were down on social media in 2020 and we predict that will continue in 2021 as people are more sensitive to what is happening around them. It could also be true that the pandemic and the social/political climate has simply taken over many conversations.
But here’s the interesting thing that brands could miss if they just did social listening around this topic. We have detected that product reviews around Valentine’s Day were up so the holiday is still very much on the minds of consumers—brands just need to make sure they really listen to the market closely so they don’t miss these opportunities.
What data are you using to understand the market?
While the breadth and depth of the external data sources that we monitor are exhaustive, the real power of our platform is how easy it is to tap into information. The insights from this blog post were uncovered in minutes simply by searching on the term “Valentine” within the Food Market Overview. Any search term may be entered to reveal other insights and answers to specific business questions.
Advanced analytics platforms like Skai are designed to reach deep, linking thousands of external data sources such as social media posts, product listings, product reviews, patent filings, key opinion leaders’ posts, research papers, business news, conference programs, clinical trial results, point-of-sale data, demographic data, blogs, forums, and other sources. Applying patented natural language processing (NLP) techniques and advanced taxonomies yields hidden consumer sentiments, pricing trends, hype cycles, advancements in research, and more
To get a demo and learn how to configure the platform to meet the needs of your business, contact our solutions team.
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*This blog post originally appeared on Signals-Analytics.com. Kenshoo acquired Signals-Analytics in December 2020. Read the press release.
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