The boomers might have had a point after all. With the price of flat whites reaching £6.50 in parts of London, you might just have to make the tradeoff between your next cup and a house deposit.
Scroll down to read about iced coffee, the Golden Quarter, and a forecast of Monday’s productivity drop-off.
Stats to power your week
🪟How can brands make their promotion of social causes more authentic? It’s a word we use all the time, but consumers have a slightly different view of what it means. To them, more than anything else it means value for money and consistent quality. Consumers evaluate how you fulfil your basic obligations before sizing up your bigger causes. GWI Pulse
👅Along with dating, language learning can be added to the list of things where doing it via app now beats everything else. Among people currently learning a language, using an app (55%) is the most popular route, just beating out watching TV and videos (46%). GWI Pulse
🏆There’s the small matter of a World Cup final this coming Sunday, and we can expect celebrations to go long into the night in whichever of the top-ranked teams makes it through. And we can forecast a drop in productivity too - 3 in 10 have taken time off after a big game, and another 2 in 10 haven’t, but they might do - if, say, the occasion was big enough… GWI Pulse
🍸We’ve officially lost count of how many heatwaves there’s been in the UK this year. One hallmark of these sunny days has been the sight of canned cocktails on scorched grass in the city’s park, a clue to a trend we’ve observed among 18-24-year-old women - who are now more likely to buy one of those pre-made cocktails (19%) than beer (18%). GWI Core (UK)
Meet the audience: Iced coffee drinkers
Without GWI data
With GWI data
Yes, more heatwave material - the temperature is clearly affecting our brains.
At first blush, AI seems to have this audience bang to rights. But there are some important differences beneath the surface. For one thing, iced coffee isn’t just a sugary indulgence for its drinkers; it can also be a post-workout reward, part of a broader wellness routine.
There’s also a Hispanic over-index that the stereotype often misses. And the audience is less affluent than you might assume. It’s easy to picture iced coffee drinkers emerging from an expensive Pilates class in their latest Lululemon set, but their average incomes sit below where that image would suggest.
That has fairly significant implications for how brands communicate with them. Casting, messaging and media choices built around a narrow, affluent wellness aesthetic may overlook a broader and more culturally diverse audience.
Chart of the week
This week’s chart comes in handy for two reasons: to help plan marketing activities around big calendar events, and to give you fair warning of how much you might spend around those same occasions…
A few insights stand out. The Golden Quarter is real, and it’s a period in which Black Friday has become one of the biggest spending events alongside Christmas - but back-to-school shopping is something of a “sleeper hit”, with real profits to be made in late summer.
For all its cultural visibility, St. Patrick’s Day has what feels like an underwhelming amount of spend. And a final note to the dads - you have our permission to point out the discrepancy with Mother’s Day when you draw up your wishlist next year.
More from GWI
If you want to build on what you’ve just learned about big spending events in the US calendar, you could do worse than check out our retail trends report.
What does AI actually know about your audience? Find out in our latest webinar on that very topic.
