Awesome banter from many of you after last week’s email. I even fell into a couple wagers over the future of Amazon Alexa and macro-economic trends. I could be up two cases of wine by the end of the year.
Anyway, keep your comments and insights coming. It’s my favorite part of writing this thing.
Here’s what we’re seeing this week:
Promoting local news content on Facebook had to be one of the easiest decisions Mark Zuckerberg ever made. With all of the attention national broadcast and cable news outlets receive – not to mention the HuffPo’s and Drudge Reports of the world – it’s easy to forget that people prefer local news over all others. Why? Because they trust local news. And in our current crazy world, that matters more than ever. The numbers prove it.
Walmart, meanwhile, is bigger than the news. Following a couple weeks of up and down headlines about Walmart raising its employees’ wages, then closing 10% of its Sam’s Club locations and slashing 1,000 corporate jobs, sentiment about the company hasn’t budged an inch. It’s worth noting that the bad news was much more widely known than the wage hike. If you ever doubt how far-reaching Walmart is, know that a whopping 88% of consumers were aware of one news story or another. Crazy.
The good news for Coke is that it’s still more popular than Pepsi among Millennials. The bad news is…um…well…Yikes!
Cutting all that caffeine must be helping those Millennials get more sleep. Piggybacking on some national news last week that Americans are sleeping more than they did a few years ago, we dug a bit deeper into our data to see who was catching more Z’s. And yes, it was our favorite avocado-toast-loving Millennials. My fellow Gen Xers are sleeping more too, by the way. But that’s just because we’re exhausted.
Every Dick’s Sporting Goods store should have a Panera next door. We track a coefficient in our database that measures the “strength of association” between the thousands of questions we ask to find things that are surprisingly or overwhelmingly correlated. A big one we discovered this week was the off-the-charts relationship between how much someone ‘loves’ Panera and how much they ‘love’ DSG. How correlated are they? Well, I could tell you that the Tschuprow’s T coefficient is .233. But then you would tell me to shut up and stop being such a dork. So just trust me. It’s a lot.
Your Random Stat of the Week
25% of adults say that their teenage self wouldn’t like who they’ve become as adults. That’s sad. What’s sadder is that it’s almost entirely correlated with how much money they’ve made in their adult lives. My teenage self would definitely be ashamed of me. For liking tofu. And kale. And Broadway cast albums.
Hoping you’re well.
JD
