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Product Price: $30

Release Date: 2004-01-01

Report Length: 67 pages

Market Coverage: US Market

Methodology: The quantitative portion of the research reported here comes from a survey of 369 of The Hartman Group’s Hartman Interactive online panel of consumers. The panel is composed of a self-selected sample of consumers who have expressed an interest in completing surveys regarding health and wellness issues.

The Hartman Group’s qualitative research is based on traditional anthropological ethnography and complementary innovative methods that allow us to observe and converse with consumers in their most “natural” settings, such as consumers’ homes and among their private social networks.

Category: Trends

Purchase Pulse Report: Connecting Beverage Consumption and Consumer Moods PURCHASE PRODUCT

Pulse Report: Connecting Beverage Consumption and Consumer Moods

The competitive landscape for beverages is not what it used to be. Today, we find consumers enjoying an ever-widening range of beverages from which to choose and, since overall consumption has not increased dramatically, competitive pressures to capture the attention of consumers have intensified.

Despite these broad changes, consumer research on the beverage market has failed to keep pace. It still seeks to align particular drink attributes with identifiable consumer needs as if success is largely a matter of engineering. Indeed, the more successful marketing strategies indicate that growth in the beverage category is less about addressing unmet consumer need gaps than about associating products and brands with creative, interesting or just plain fun imagery.

Report Overview

In this Pulse Report, The Hartman Group examines the extent to which consumers link different moods or general interests to specific beverage types. Respondents were asked to select, from among 12 different beverage categories, the drinks they would choose to complement a particular feeling or intent. We purposely avoided providing contextual information, such as time of day, meal accompaniments or other cues, in order to reveal the abstract associations that exist between different moods and individual beverage categories.

This report summarizes our findings on three general research questions:

  1. What beverages do consumers routinely drink?
  2. What beverages do different moods conjure?
  3. How well do moods differentiate beverage categories?

Rather than catalog the reasons why consumers select different beverages we set out to determine the strength of associations that exist between beverages of a given kind and selected moods, such as feeling bored, or situation-specific interests, such as wanting to appear serious. The purpose of this analysis is to gain a better understanding of the broad categorical distinctions that consumers make between different beverages depending on their mood.