Cachaça's Rising Interest In The U.S.

Playing around with Google Search Insights, I wanted to see what I could divine about cachaça interest in the U.S.

Above, you see a normalized-to-100 graph of searches in the U.S. for "cachaça". Clearly an upward, seasonal trend over the past four years, with a significant spike this year.

The truly cool thing about this Google trick is that you can download the results into a spreadsheet and play with the data a little in Excel. The red line is a 14-period moving average of the search behavior, to make the chart a little easier to look at and derive meaning from.

Picked a heckuva time to start this little project, eh?

The picture gets even more interesting when you see what people are searching for and from where. More after the jump.

This graph above -- if it's accurate at all -- shouldn't be too surprising.

It reflects a mix of the country's cultural bellweathers (e.g., New York and California) and major import hubs (e.g., Florida, Connecticut, and Maryland).

So far, Cachaçagora has either pointed readers to or phoned up U.S. cachaça-related operations in half these states.In other words, Google's graph is at least consistent with my own recent experience.

The picture really starts to get fun when you look at what people are actually searching for. For example, this graph here reflects search behavior from 2004 on up.

As you can see, three of these searches are branded: two different ways to search for "Leblon" and then the search for "Cabana Cachaça".

It's worth noting that, as of this writing, no cachaca maker shows up in the first page of Google search results in a search for "caipirinha". On the second page, you have Leblon, closely followed by Mãe De Ouro, who thoughtfully secured the "caipirinha.us" domain.

Now, let's just look at search behavior from just this past year:

Clearly, Cabana's racy ads have had some effect on interest and search behavior.

Just sticking a wet digital finger in the air, I'm wondering how many of these looky-loos hoping to get a glimpse of exactly how "authentically brazilian" the model is are prone to ever purchase the product.

It's not unreasonable to assume that the relatively recent rise in searches for "cachaça" have had a good deal to do with Cabana's efforts. If their efforts to promote their brand grow the category as a whole, then I suppose that's a good thing. That said, I don't think the category will get too far in the long run on the basis of insert-hot-sexy-latina-here marketing alone. Time will tell.

Look forward to further armchair quarterbacking of cachaça's northward march in future posts.

Comments

[Camper English]

Fun with statistics- great blog post Phil.

[Phil]

Thanks, Camper! And thanks for reading!