With the COVID-19 pandemic leaving most shoppers sheltered in place, many Americans have turned to crafting to pass the time. JOANN is taking advantage of this fad to launch an IPO, but will the glitter of crafting stay glued once consumers are able to leave the house? In today’s Insight Flash, we examine JOANN’s prospects vs. other craft destinations based on overall growth, new customer acquisition, and demographics.
The digitization of money and banking was inevitable. The pandemic merely accelerated its adoption. 2020 forced us to finally download our bank's app (if we hadn't already) and take all of our transactions online. As a result, finance apps hit record highs for both downloads and user sessions in Q4. To unpack the recent growth of the fintech space, we sat down with mobile and banking experts from Adjust, MoEngage, Visa, Current and Kredivo. Together, we identified the key trends and success strategies of the past year.
Direct-2-consumer (D2C) businesses have grown considerably over the last decade-plus. When companies such as Warby Parker and Allbirds launched, their mission to deliver goods big and small to customers’ front door was a unique option that piqued busy Americans' interest. Today, virtually anything you need or crave is now available for delivery online — dish sponges, glasses, socks, cleaning supplies, mattresses, deodorant, luggage, even your groceries for the week.
With alcohol delivery sales reaching new heights in the pandemic, American Airlines has recently announced its plans to start a wine delivery service to sell some of its surplus wine that isn’t being consumed on flights. However, an increasingly crowded category and rising consumer demand means that market share among DTC wine companies has shifted over time.
In December 2020, Chick-fil-A led its competitors in chicken sandwich online spend, with Popeyes trailing a distant second. The battle between quick service restaurants for chicken sandwich sales has yet to lose any steam entering 2021. Both Popeyes and KFC have recently publicly expressed their efforts of “playing to win” in the fiercely competitive market, while Taco Bell has also announced intentions to join the fray.
As we previously covered, the iPhone 12 is finally allowing Apple enthusiasts to connect to 5G. We’re back with fresh data to see how user adoption and new 5G rollouts have affected performance worldwide. After the launch of various iPhone 12 models, the daily count of unique devices worldwide that are capable of connecting to 5G spiked significantly compared to the year as a whole.
Once upon a time, people could only buy deodorant and cold medicine from their local pharmacy or wholesale club. That was then. Now, Consumer Packaged Goods (CPG) have carved out a nice space for themselves in the online marketplace. So much so that close to one in four U.S. households buy their food and beverages exclusively online. Even more, the number of consumers ordering their health and hygiene products online could double within a year.
In this Placer Bytes, we dive into the impressive results from the TJX portfolio, and the Q4 performances from Dillards and Macy’s. The wider TJX portfolio had an exceptional end to 2020 and a very strong start to 2021. Visits to T.J. Maxx, Marshalls, and HomeGoods locations quickly overcame a visit drop between October and November as COVID cases surged and then sustained the positive momentum into 2021.
Ask any Disney Plus subscriber and they'll tell you: the $7-a-month streaming service isn't just for kids. There's something for the whole family from Star Wars and The Mandalorian to Marvel, Pixar, National Geographic, and Disney classics like Snow White. And with everyone cooped up in the house, it's the perfect family-friendly, socially-distanced escape from reality. Let’s go behind the scenes with Pathmatics marketing intelligence to see how Disney promoted its streaming service in 2020. Everything from the brand’s strategy to its top channels and advertisements is outlined below.
January is well-known to be the biggest month for health and fitness app activity, so let's take the data out for a spin and see what we can determine. We'll start high level and then drill down into the performance of several Health & Fitness subcategories for the United States.
When many Americans sheltered in their homes early in the coronavirus pandemic, meal delivery sales reached new heights. Our data reveals that in January, sales for meal delivery services grew 164 percent year-over-year, collectively. Shelter-in-place orders may also be driving more Americans to make their first meal delivery purchase. In January, 46 percent of U.S. consumers had ever ordered from one of the services in our analysis, up from 36 percent a year ago.
When U.S. cities and states faced shelter-in-place orders to limit the spread of the coronavirus, Americans’ reduced mobility resulted in plummeting sales at rideshare companies. While rideshare sales have been gradually recovering over the past several months, November marked a decline for the first time since April. Sales rebounded slightly in January, but Uber sales were still down 67 percent year-over-year and Lyft sales were down 70 percent year-over-year.
Admittedly, we have high hopes for the gym sector and for Planet Fitness specifically. But there are reasons for the excitement and January data shows both why we are particularly optimistic, and why that optimism may be difficult to see upon initial glance. Looking at Planet Fitness monthly visits year over year paints a very clear, if not expected, picture. The brand kicked off 2020 with huge amounts of visit growth before quickly and obviously succumbing to the damaging effects of COVID.
In a former report, we used Measurable AI’s unique e-receipts data to look at the food delivery industry in APAC in the early months of covid-19, and saw a huge surge in food delivery volume. After six months, the pandemic is still not over, and so is the competition among the food delivery companies. Based on one year of historical data in 2020, Measurable AI presents the second part of the food delivery industry research, covering market share, user behavior, and pricing strategy.
January was encouraging for the restaurant industry. With same-store sales growth of -4.9% and traffic growth of -12.2%, it was the best performance for restaurants since the beginning of the pandemic almost a year ago. This is good news for an industry that struggled the last two months of 2020, as sales and traffic growth worsened compared to the COVID-era peak achieved in October. Likely contributing to some of the consumer pent up demand for restaurant spending was a combination stimulus check distribution, a sense of optimism from turning the page on 2020 and the increased prospect of additional government aid soon.
The mass migration from broadcast TV to on-demand – and from big-screen to mobile – started a decade ago. Lockdown moved it to a new level, with app-based video streaming up 40% in a year. According to our State of Mobile 2021 report, global mobile consumers streamed 146 billion hours on mobile devices in Q1 2019. By Q4 2020 they were streaming around 240 billion hours — a rise of nearly 65% in 2 years. The increase for 2020 alone was 40% to 935 billion hours.
It seems that not even a global pandemic can keep people off dating apps – as female-marketed Bumble lands an $8B valuation in its IPO. In the last four years Bumble has grown from low single digits to capture 13% of the dating market by sales, while eharmony, Zoosk, and other* smaller services saw their shares decline.
Consumer Edge’s recently launched UK dataset is very complimentary to our existing US data, and has proven to be highly predictive for US-based companies, such as AMZN, in both markets. In today’s Insight Flash, we examine how trends in the two countries have differed, including spend growth, average ticket, and the importance of Prime Day.
It’s been a year now into full or partial lockdowns, social distancing rules and work from home as a result of the COVID crisis which unequivocally forced people to spend more time into their homes and consequently to change their shopping habits - reconsidering what is essential and therefore set new priorities on what to buy. One of the new essentials seems to be – not surprisingly – bedding products as people seek extra comfort at home. Mattress sales soared in the second half of 2020 since many Americans decided to upgrade their sleeping setup.
Walmart felt the same offline effects as other retailers in late 2020 as the holiday season was hit hard by a resurgence of COVID cases. The result was a November year-over-year visit gap of 13.8%, the largest since April. But December saw the visit gap shrink to 10.6%, and January saw that drop to just 7.2% year over year – the best since October’s mark of 6.7%. And while this is a success in and of itself, when combined with the mission-driven shopping trend that has boosted basket size, the impact could be even more significant.
