Hitwise Intelligence - Robin Goad - UK
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March 20, 2008
Retail price index and organic food
The Office of National Statistics (ONS) has just announced the latest round of changes to the basket of goods it uses to calculate the UK retail price index (RPI). In addition to providing inflation figures, the make up of the RPI also provides an interesting insight into changes in UK consumer behaviour Of course, another interesting source of data on consumer spending patterns is our very own search data, so I thought I’d compare the ONS’s list of ‘hot and not’ products with our own.
First up: the fast moving world of gadgets. The 650 goods in the basket now include a variety of digital storage devices, ranging from memory sticks and cards to MP3 players and mobile phones; while Microwaves and traditional 35mm camera films have both been dropped (the cameras themselves were dropped last year). We highlighted the fate of non-digital cameras before Christmas, so here I’ll focus on the memory vs. microwaves battle.
As you can see from the chart below, searches for memory cards in particular are doing well, while searches for microwaves (the purple line) are indeed in decline. However, I wouldn’t say that microwaves are quite over yet - particularly when compared with TV repairs, another technical product that was dropped this time round and that hardly registers at all in our search data.
Interestingly, the dropping of microwaves from the basket coincided with the exclusion of frozen vegetarian ready meals. Indeed, changing eating habits is a key trend, with the ONS highlighting the growth in both café culture (muffins were added to the list) and more healthy and organic products (smoothies, satsumas and clemantines are also now included).So, are Brits really spending more time hanging around in cafes and cooking organic vegetables, and less time heating up ready meals in the microwave?
When it comes to searching for food on the web, it certainly seems to be the case. Searches for ‘organic food’ have trebled over the last six months, while ‘frozen food’ barely registers as a search term. The chart below illustrates the breadth of searches for ‘organic’ and ‘frozen’ – i.e. the number of distinct search terms containing each word. As you can see, last week there were over twice and many search terms containing ‘organic’ as there were ‘frozen’. However, the number of search terms containing ‘frozen’ is actually on the increase, so I don’t think that we’re quite in food heaven just yet.
One final interesting thing about the graph is the change in search activity over the Christmas period. Searches containing ‘frozen’ peak the week before Christmas, presumably as people stock up the freezer for the holiday, while ‘organic’ searches drop during the main Christmas weeks. However ‘organic’ searches shoot up again in the New Year, possibly as a result of people’s healthy eating resolutions.
Posted by Robin Goad at 10:00 AM
Posted to Christmas | Food | Gadgets | Retail | Search | Shopping and Classifieds
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Comments
Thanks for the analysis Robin. Good to have concrete data.
Indeed, the search volume for organic related foods in the US has increased at a high rate too. We recently launched Organic Maca Powder and has seen an interesting level of searches that mostly involved the keyword "organic". Some of the long tail keywords has nothing to do with Maca, but organic.
Posted by: Augusto Ellacuriaga at March 30, 2008 01:27 AM
