Brewing Trends

There is so much information out on the web.

From analytics in social media to tracking page views, sites collect every action customers take to gain a slightly better understanding of who they are as consumers.

As a brand, this is great, as we have a multitude of information to scroll through, showing who our customers are, where potential consumers are coming from, and how we can maintain a presence where they are.

This is also excellent when trying to decide where to open a flagship coffee shop, as we can use online resources like Google Trends to understand what state might be the best to jump into.

I’ll walk through why Nevada is an excellent contender for a brand-new drive-thru coffee business.

Trends

Let’s dive into the data.

One of the best online tools out there right now for a marketer or anyone interested in data is Google Trends.

Google Trends is an excellent resource for understanding trends in search terms, categories, and topics by giving data on what people are searching on Google.

We can start by just looking at the overall category of Coffee & Tea for Nevada and see what kinds of things people are searching for currently.

Let’s first look at this graph at the top. Here, we are able to see that the Coffee & Tea category has remained near the top of its overall popularity throughout the past 30 days.

Even when switching to the past year, we see that we’re consistently hovering around the 70-90% mark, showing clear and consistent popularity in the state.

And the story continues to get better the more we look into the trends.

One of the tabs we should look at is the search queries, where we can see that 4 out of the 5 top queries are all independent local chain coffee shops in Nevada.

This is perfect, as not only does this show that people are more likely going to go to an independent store over a chain, but it also allows a new brand to start small and grow over time instead of jumping into a market like Massachusetts, where brand loyalty to Dunkin Donuts is like an iron fortress to break through.

Nevada is also perfect as it has two big cities, Reno and Las Vegas, with great flat (and cheap) suburbs where locations can be built to establish further brand loyalty.

Along with the neighboring states of California, Oregon, and Arizona, all considered excellent markets for coffee shops, this gives the brand room to expand once fully established in Nevada.

We’re even able to see the possibilities through Google Trends. By entering generic terms like “Coffee” we can see the popularity by states and cities, showing how west coast states like California, Utah, and Arizona are prime areas for local coffee shops.

We can also look at competition through Google Trends by inputting other coffee companies and seeing how popular they are in Nevada specifically.

From the data, it shows that Starbucks is the clear leader in national coffee chains, with Dutch Bros and Dunkin’ Donuts both further behind.

This gives us valuable insight into how much control these brands have over Nevada, and from the initial data, we can see that most hover around 50% of its peak popularity.

And once we add a generic search term (that most people look up to find coffee places nearby) we can see that Starbucks and other coffee shops hover around similar levels of popularity.

Altogether, Nevada stands out as an excellent candidate for opening a first chain coffee location, given its perfect location, established local coffee scene, and already weakened competition.

With careful expansion and growth, a new brand can easily excel and grow to a prominent competitor in no time.