These consumer insights help understand the habits of wine drinkers and give us a better understanding of how to market to them. Even if you’re not in the drinks trade, you can see what insights could be gathered from your industry with image recognition.
For this example, we've focused on Instagram, as food and drink are great for visual storytelling, and to make the most of our proprietary image recognition tech (it works on the full Twitter firehose, 10+ social networks and 150 million websites worldwide).
Wine, Wein or Vino?
How often is wine mentioned in one day on Instagram?
A lot.
To get a better understanding of what is being said, we’ve used our image recognition technology to analyze the posts tagged with the most popular wine hashtags (#Vin, #Wine, #Vino, #Wein, and #Wijn) over the last 6 months.
We can obtain more contextual content from images than hashtags provide, and this gives us a better picture of the world’s drinking habits.
Scene image recognition
Changing drinking habits
Traditionally, wine was an accompaniment for food, and yet our scene analytics showed that it’s become more popular away from the dining table.
Top ten scenes detected for posts containing our 5 wine hashtags.
Across all hashtags, the beach was the second most common scene.
Our consumption habits are changing, as wine becomes less of an accompaniment, and more a casual drink. Even in the home, it was associated more with the living room, than the kitchen.
Marketers need to observe these changing habits and adapt their campaigns to suit.
Seasonal changes
Across the different hashtags, our drinking habits remained pretty consistent from July to November. But when December came (and Christmas), things changed dramatically.
Swimming pools and beach scenes no longer appeared related to #Wijn (not surprising as the Netherlands gets so cold over winter). And, the impact of the Christmas markets saw an increase in outdoor scenes across all hashtags, particularly with Germany seeing more wine drinking at amusement parks for #Wein.
Object image recognition
Wine accompaniments
What goes well with a glass of wine?
Our image recognition technology deciphered that too.
After filtering out the most obvious objects from the scenes (who would have thought wine would be associated with wine glasses or bottles??), analyzing the objects included with mentions of a wine hashtag helped define our dining preferences.
The top ten objects detected for posts containing our 5 wine hashtags.
Wine was more likely to accompany cake than pizza. No wonder, when you can find some surprising wine and cake combinations.
It was especially notable for #Vin. French speakers really do appreciate the finer things in life, whether that’s wine or patisseries.
Note the significant difference between how often cake and pizza were detected in posts containing #Vin.
Where do we drink wine?
Our drinking habits were revealed too. Though many people liked to relax in front of the TV with a glass, there were a significant number who drank as they worked, with laptops appearing with the wine hashtags regularly.
#Vin was an extreme example of this, with laptops featured more than TVs.
On the other hand, #Wijn drinkers were more likely to be bibliophiles, as books appeared more often than either laptops or TVs. The Netherlands seem to prefer a good book over a TV show when it comes to unwinding with a drink.
Knowing these trends will help wine producers define the best way to advertise their products to their consumers. So while TV advertising would be ok to target #Wine drinkers, digital advertising would be more relevant for #Vin drinkers, and a promotion with a book publisher would be more effective for targeting #Wijn consumers.
Although, no matter where you are, wine o’clock resonates with everyone, with clocks trending in the top ten objects for all our hashtags.
To discover more about your brand's hashtags, you can use Talkwalker Free Social Search.
Brand image recognition
Wine, beer, and spirits
Of course, we also wanted to know what brands were forefront in our images, and our image recognition tech found that too.
You may be surprised that a wine brand didn't top the list.
The top ten detected brands for posts containing our 5 wine hashtags.
But don’t be. Though it’s common to find branded beer glasses, branded wine glasses are significantly rarer. So often our image recognition technology couldn’t detect the unbranded featured wine, but the drink that accompanied it. Or as in this example, the ice bucket.
To get better brand recognition and shareability, wine brands could certainly improve their visual storytelling on Instagram with branded glasses.
And although the accompanying beers often changed depending on the hashtag (Heineken, Corona, and Guinness for #Wine; Bitburger and Erdinger for #Wein), Moet & Chandon and Veuve Clicquot are the only two wine brands that appeared across all hashtags, with Bollinger just sneaking in to join them for #Vin.
Wine and chocolate
Of course, we all know wine and chocolate are the perfect pairing. But which chocolate?
It depends on where you are from.
For #Wijn, Milka was the chocolate of choice.
While for #Wein, Raffaello was preferred.
And for #Vino, some people liked the rather unusual combination of sparkling wine with Nutella.
It's worth knowing what your consumers are consuming with your product, to enable you to run more effective promotions with associated brands.
Wine and Coke?
What initially appeared to be the most unusual brand combination was Coca-Cola and wine. Until we discovered when mixed together, they make Kalimotxo, an iconic drink of the Basque culture.
This was particularly dominant for #Vino and #Wein.
Hashtag hijacking from AP24
With all those mentions of wine, AP24 saw an opportunity.
Seeing the popularity of wine hashtags, they incorporated them into their social marketing. This meant they could engage with people more likely to buy their product, and increase the reach of their messages.
Savvy sharing meant they were the overall most recognized brand in our hashtags.
Cheers, santé, proost, cin cin, salud, prost
There we have it. Our proprietary image recognition technology has shown, no matter where we are in the world, we all enjoy a glass of wine every now and then. Though whether that’s on the beach, or in the bathtub, is really down to the individual.
If you've any questions on using image recognition, feel free to leave a comment. Or you can discover how to get visual customer insights for your brand by clicking below.
