Valentines
What can search volume tell you?
When people shop for luxury goods like Tiffany, jewelry, rings, etc.- Christmas, Valentines, and Mother’s Day, respectively.
Is it a good idea to try to sell your house in the winter? (probably not)
When the government’s “cash for clunkers” was launched (August 2009)
Whether people are getting more involved in their personal finance? (looks like it)
Whether people think the economy has turned around? (probably not yet)
Interesting Search Observations – chocolate covered cherries vs chocolate covered strawberries
Chocolate covered cherries are more popular (more searched) at Christmas; but chocolate covered strawberries are more popular at Valentines. By observing what people pull for, we can derive insights that are useful in business strategy, inventory planning, and marketing (by ads around chocolate covered strawberries for valentines but cherries for christmas)
Source: Google External Keyword Tool – Search Volume Trends
via Niall McKinney, uTalk Marketing. At Valentines, women need more help picking gifts (search volume for “gifts for guys” consistently higher every February for the past 5 years). But “gifts for girls” shows dramatically higher volume every Christmas.
Occasions and Holidays Drive Movie Box Office Sales, Not Advertising
Taking the top box office results for each of 52 weekends from the past 10 complete years (1998 – 2008; Source: IMDB.com) we see consistently that occasions like Valentines, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving show increased movie going activity. People have more time during these holidays to go to the movies and Valentines is a date+movie occasion. Also, during the summer, many people go to the movie theatre to escape the heat so there is an overall hump every year during the summer months — from Memorial Day to Labor Day.
People go out during Valentines, Memorial Day, July 4th, and Thanksgiving. And they still spend what they planned to spend — 2 tickets for movie — they didn’t buy 2 more tickets and see a second movie on the same date or holiday weekend. If they had several good movies to choose from (often, they don’t), they would choose to spend the finite dollars on the one movie they really wanted to see. The overall movie spending “pie” did not increase much, if any, year over year.
1998 $4,055,194,733 n/a
1999 $4,253,601,768 5%
2000 $4,496,554,005 6%
2001 $5,003,433,737 11%
2002 $5,489,974,199 10%
2003 $5,581,797,720 2%
2004 $ 5,697,299,530 2%
2005 $ 5,524,566,579 -3%
2006 $ 5,660,826,625 +2%
2007 $ 5,968,027,963 +5%
2008 $ 5,887,193,490 -1%
The chart below shows a red line which is the average of all 10 years. The 10 thin blue lines are the annual lines from1998 – 2008, inclusive and these are plotted as actual dollars. They come out right on top of each other.
Movie advertising, which runs into the hundreds of millions of dollars a year, has failed to noticeably increase the overall spending year-round or even during specific times. The chart below shows the differentials (difference between an annual line and the 10-yr average line). These all hover closely in the +$50M and -$50M band. The amplitude of the 10-yr average (red line) is larger than $50M in the summer hump — implying that the average change in movie ticket sales due to normal seasonality is larger than the change in amplitude caused by ALL movie advertising combined.
And the summer “hump” is due to actual demand (people going out to movie theatres, some to escape the heat) not due to advertising. The only effect of advertising is to share-shift from one movie to another — the total spending remains consistent and even seasonal variations are consistent — a “zero-sum game.”
All-Time USA Box office
Source: IMDB.com
Rank | Title | USA Box Office |
1. | Titanic (1997) | $600,779,824 |
2. | The Dark Knight (2008) | $533,316,061 |
3. | Star Wars (1977) | $460,935,665 |
4. | Shrek 2 (2004) | $436,471,036 |
5. | E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial (1982) | $434,949,459 |
6. | Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace(1999) | $431,065,444 |
7. | Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest (2006) | $423,032,628 |
8. | Spider-Man (2002) | $403,706,375 |
9. | Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005) | $380,262,555 |
10. | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King(2003) | $377,019,252 |
11. | Spider-Man 2 (2004) | $373,377,893 |
12. | The Passion of the Christ (2004) | $370,270,943 |
13. | Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (2009) | $367,614,540 |
14. | Jurassic Park (1993) | $356,784,000 |
15. | The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers (2002) | $340,478,898 |
16. | Finding Nemo (2003) | $339,714,367 |
17. | Spider-Man 3 (2007) | $336,530,303 |
18. | Forrest Gump (1994) | $329,691,196 |
19. | The Lion King (1994) | $328,423,001 |
20. | Shrek the Third (2007) | $320,706,665 |
21. | Transformers (2007) | $318,759,914 |
22. | Iron Man (2008) | $318,298,180 |
23. | Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone (2001) | $317,557,891 |
24. | Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull(2008) | $317,011,114 |
25. | The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring(2001) | $313,837,577 |
Spend polarization
The 2011 year-to-date stock performance of retail stocks show that “ultra low end” Dollar Tree (DLTR) and “ultra high end”Whole Foods (WFM) are the best performers whereas companies that are in the “practically undifferentiated middle” are down — Target (TGT) and Saks (SKS).
ORIGINAL POST: February 23, 2009.
Spend polarization – in this economy, people will try to save every last penny so they will spend more at Wal-mart (low prices). But when they do treat themselves, they will spend on even higher end items like $40 balsamic vinegar, or high end chocolate (high prices).
Jacques Torres was packed before Valentines this year
low end
1. people buying private label, generics, or store brands (quality of which are pretty comparable to name brands)
Private Labels winning the battle of the brands
http://adage.com/article?article_id=134791
high end
2.we were at Williams Sonoma yesterday and I watched 3 families buy Shun knives (super expensive) and Shun has just released an even higher end series of knives by Michel Bras
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