Reading Tea Leaves with Free Data

Never before in the history of mankind (or womankind) has there been so much free data at our disposal. For the marketer or public relations professional, this is sheer gold. The tools we now have can tell us an awful lot about the people we are trying to reach, their thought processes and how they talk to each other.

Every few months we get access to new tools that take some of the guesswork out of marketing. The trick is to pull them all together. Over the next few weeks I will blog about many ways you can take advantage of all of this free information. These posts will be filed under the new Research category on my blog. Here's one example.

In the United States manufactures think a lot about confidence as a future indicator of the consumer's interest in spending on big ticket items like cars. Naturally, fuel prices are a big influence on what consumers will buy - hybrids or SUVs. Let's take a closer look and see what the data shows us.

A Google News search on the subject turned up 771 articles just today that mention "gas prices." Gas Buddy confirms that the hype is real. A gallon of gasoline in the US, as of this writing, is $2.85 - the highest since the run-up after Hurricane Katrina. Naturally, as the media hype rises, so does the blog chatter. The conversation volume mentioning "gas prices" is running about 1,000 posts per day, down slightly from late April.

So are price sensitive consumers freaked? Well, the data says they're getting there. If you take a look at the four charts below you will notice gas prices, traffic to gasbuddy.com, and blog chatter are all rising in sync. Google Trends appears to be lagging behind the other leading indicators, but that might be a function of their data not being quite as current as the rest. Meanwhile, an Indeed.com search shows that hiring at gas stations is picking up too, which may indicate that demand for fuel is hardly waning. The takeaway here is that consumers don't appear to be conserving a lot - at least yet.

Let's see if this carries over to autos. With all of the hype around gas prices rising over the past few years it would stand to reason that interest in hybrid cars like the Toyota Prius might be outstripping big SUVs like the Hummer. Well, no.

Take a look at the following charts. You will note that: Google searches for Hummer have hardly slipped, while searches for the Prius rose for a brief time but have flattened. In addition, the Hummer's blog chatter has been rising more rapidly than that of the Prius.

While none of this data is a slam dunk, the trends do lead us to a few conclusions:

* Fuel prices are a big consumer concern once they creep above $2.25 a gallon or so
* The blogosphere directly mirrors the hype in the press
* Despite the rising gas prices, interest in SUVs hasn't waned yet and hybrids are not taking off quite as fast as perhaps people think

This is great data that can help guide many marketing programs - and it's all free.

Technorati Tags: Data, Hybrids, Market Research, Gas Prices, SUVs