Single Serve Coffee BrewersReport & Analysis

Author: Aaron WeberRev 5 – 15.12.11

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This report is intended to examine and analyze the online space around single-serve coffee products in order to determine:

1. Where are consumers likely to encounter product review, recommendations, or general information around the topic

2. How likely is that information to be trustworthy3. What (if any) influencers can be found within the space4. Where are genuine conversations around single-serve

occurring

Statement of Purpose

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Methodology

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Over the course of 45 days relevant data was compiled by human and automated processes searching public spaces and sites for posts, comments, and pages discussing coffee pods and brewers with a focus on:

1. Cost2. Convenience3. Taste and flavor4. Coffee variety5. Environmental impact

Data was then vetted and qualified for relevance and content to create a working sample of 3000 distinct pages across 1600 distinct sites.

For the purpose of this report irrelevant sites (defined as keyword matching but not germane to the topic or simply SEO traps designed to generate ad or affiliate revenue through misdirection) were discarded as per instruction, however their impact where needed will be noted.

Where Does Information Reside?

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Consumers searching online for information around single-serve coffee will generally encounter a wealth of results that follow the segmentation shown to the right.

While the majority of content would fall under the “Blogs” category, in truth consumers searching within that realm are more likely to encounter aggregated product descriptions or paid content than genuine personal sentiment or discussion by nearly 20-1.

News-related content is most likely to be either financial in nature (corporate earnings) or newswire articles touting product lines or new offerings rather than lifestyle or food-related reporting.

Where Does Information Reside? (cont.)

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While tweets on this topic are sometimes genuine, more often the platform is used to broadcast coupon, sales, and product advertisement.

General information and company landing pages should be considered the most likely destination for consumers looking for initial information, followed by shopping or review sites.

Few forums are dedicated solely to single-cup coffee, and in many cases social conversations don’t occur on forums specific to the subject, making them difficult to find for casual consumers.

Video reviews are prevalent, though the vast majority of coffee related video content is dedicated to boutique or specialty roasts, not single-cup coffee.

What Is The Average Sentiment?

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From our data we find that sentiment around coffee pods or single-serve coffee is vastly more positive than not.

This positive sentiment can be attributed to a number of factors but is typically due to:

• Price• Convenience• Lack of waste

General opponents of single-cup coffee tend to cite taste and environmental waste as their largest complaint, but negative sentiment among fans of single-cup coffee is most often due to a single factor:

Lack of variety compared to traditional or quantity-cup brewers.

The Terminology of Coffee Pods & Brewers

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Arranged by how frequently the terms appear we can see that consumers looking for information will more likely than not encounter Keurig and Green Mountain as brand terms, while descriptive terms are driven down by pricing and deal-related terminology. Note than while positive adjectives don’t rank highly, there is a noticeable absence of negative adjectives (hate, awful, bad, etc.)

As previously mentioned the overwhelming majority of non-shopping material around the topic of coffee pods and brewers is comprised of spam.

In most cases that spam takes the form of a templated website that is aggregated paid content from any number of sources, along with purchase links (typically Amazon affiliates) or Google ads.

As these sites are cheap to produce and can represent substantial revenue they often employ aggressive SEO strategies to drive search referrers to themselves or partners. These sites tend to appear and disappear with some frequency creating a frustrating experience for consumers looking to educate themselves.

Due to the prevalence of spam there are no definitive blog resources readily available for consumers.

How Trustworthy Is Found Information?

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However a side effect of these SEO tactics is that any official product information (whether that’s presented in editorial or technical form) is often repurposed and aggregated across literally thousands of spam sites.

While the destination sites will not be ideal quality this means that new product info is guaranteed visibility.

How Trustworthy Is Found Information? (cont.)

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Top Domains

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When viewed by sheer volume, the list of commonly occurring domains (or sites) is drastically different from the overall segmentation of the whole.

However we see evidence of the otherwise hidden conversations around this topic – For instance a Martin guitar forum (#6) in which regular visitors talk about whether or not to buy a single-cup brewer, and offer recommendations.

Top Influencers

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When looking at the entire topic we see that Green Mountain Coffee’s Keurig brewer shopping page is the single most influential page within this topic followed by The Coffee Detective Blog, which ranks as high as it does by being on-topic and prolific not by virtue of traffic or external links, though it does seem to generate enough comments per post to count as authoritative.

The remaining slots are dominated by shopping and review sites

Network Analysis

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Visualizing the individual pages of this topic as a galaxy map allows us to put the dispersion of sites into perspective.

When we include the top 5000 linked and un-linked pages we see very few connected pages (denoted by spheres attached via lines), but instead we see literally thousands of disconnected pages with no serious communities bridging across domains.

Network Analysis

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If we separate out the connected sites from the disconnected pages we only small clusters of pages linking to one another. These represent domains that are linking to themselves (not to external content).

This reinforces the theory that there is simply no authoritative domain or site for the topic of Single Serve Coffee but rather a collection of small sites that are mostly talking to themselves.

Network Analysis

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To illustrate this point: the visual to the right shows Green Mountain’s Keurig page (the #1 influence ranked page) in the center, and displays other pages within this topic that link to it directly with disconnected sites displayed along the outermost rim.

The lack of authoritative coffee-related sites that have significant reach means consumers must either seek information where they already reside online, or rely on general product reviews on shopping sites.

The noise-factor in searching for information about single-cup options is disheartening for consumers, meaning searchers are less likely to trust found information if they can’t verify the source.

In short – there is no cohesive “coffee ecosystem” online to be tapped, but rather a collection of unaligned sites speaking to micro audiences.

Conclusions

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Recommendations

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The cost-to-benefit ratio around promoting earned content on coffee-related sites is grossly unfavorable.

From an SEO perspective the fact that spammers will repurpose official product descriptions is unfortunate (though cost-negative), but ultimately it does ensure positive product terms will rise up in search.

Paid or earned content should be positioned on established lifestyle / living sites where the target demographic already resides such as Huffington Post, Lifehacker, etc. as this provides a trusted avenue for information and one more likely to be seen by target consumers.

Blogs : Blog platforms and sites

News : New and traditional news portals

Social : Forums, message boards, micro blogs, social networking, social bookmarks

General Information : Corporate sites, reference sites, non-categorized information

Shopping & Review : Shopping portals, consumer and product review, coupon sites

Video : Video aggregators and portal

Twitter

Positive SentimentNegative SentimentNeutral Sentiment

Image Key

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built different.

Compiled and reported on byAaron Weber on behalf of

Supporting data can be accessed via the LBP Manufacturing Project @ s16.spiral16.com