This week in ICM 524: Your coffee manufacturing company is considering getting into the end-user market by opening ten drive-thru coffee shops somewhere in the country in the next 12 months and then another 25 by the following year. You, as the head of social media, will make research using Google Trends and prepare a report to the top management.
If you are like me and new to Google Trends, it looks back at how people search for information over different time periods. Each phrase is given a relative daily search term score, on a scale from 0 – 100. I couldn’t see how to run a search by State, so I am using the following to give a visual sense of which coffee types are popular across the U.S.:
This kind of broad-brush search term can help in making product and some promotional decisions by showing product popularity and seasonal trends over the past five years, but it is limited because it is retroactive and there are many external present-day factors that would influence the potential success of a new drive through coffee shop chain: changing demographics, construction projects, ongoing return-to-work policies etc.
District of Columbia Neighborhoods
I found twenty+ neighborhoods in the District of Columbia, so more refined searches are needed to find the specific neighborhoods that offer an optimal mix of demographics and lifestyle to support a new drive-through coffee chain.
For another local overlay, let’s take a look at what the Yelp search term “best coffee near me” in the category of “coffee and tea”, “offers takeout” in the District of Columbia returns. I looked at the results for walking (2-mile radius) and driving (5-mile radius) to find other coffee shops in the area and what they serve. I didn’t find any options for drive-through in the District of Columbia on the Dunkin Donuts website. Starbucks seems to be more spread out throughout the State.
To build a national brand that competes with big names like Starbucks and Dunkin Donuts, a flagship location in a D.C. neighborhood could be one way to quickly establish a foothold.
Ref. District of Columbia
On A Mission 
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