There are many reasons why a person may opt for alcohol-free/low alcohol (NoLo) drinks – some cannot drink alcohol for religious reasons, some would like to lead a healthier lifestyle, and others might just want to explore other options.
Whatever the reason, people’s attitudes towards alcoholic drinks have changed over the years, with the need and want for non-alcoholic drinks steadily increasing. With Dry January just around the corner, and drinking culture surrounding the holiday season, the topic of NoLo becomes more relevant in the public consciousness.
Analysing NoLo conversation
At SHARE we use our in-house Natural Language Processing (NLP) tool, ParseR, to analyse conversations around particular topics, providing us with interesting insights and aiding strategy for client projects. We scraped around 10,000 NoLo related posts from several social media platforms and created a bigram network, that is, we observed the most common pairs of words in the dataset.
Understandably, there are mentions of sobriety and Sober October, a campaign that encourages people to remain sober throughout the month to raise money for charity. Beer and wine are the most frequently mentioned types of drink, and gluten-free also appears regularly, demonstrating the demand for alternative options.
Alcohol-free in times of COVID
Covid-19 has of course been a hot topic throughout 2020, so it comes as no surprise that it is one of the most dominant themes in the data. Conversations are centred around the role of alcohol within hand sanitiser, and the inclusion of non-alcoholic drinks during the Eat Out to Help Out Scheme. Most types of hand sanitiser contain high amounts of alcohol but, with the number of Covid cases rising and the demand for hand sanitiser soaring, alcohol-free solutions had to be provided for those not able to use the original versions.
Another facet of ParseR allows us to identify terms in the data that are most correlated with another term. Segregating NoLo drinks conversation from Covid-related terms, we can find terms most correlated with “low alcohol” or “alcohol-free”. As before, themes of sobriety and lifestyle choices emerge, with mentions of self-care. This analysis allows us to infer that there are positive connotations associated with NoLo drinks, with the emergence of terms “happy”, “amazing”, and “sobrietyrocks”.
According to the market research company Nielsen, the total UK consumption of alcohol halved during the first lockdown. Sales of NoLo drinks also rose by 32.5%. If you’re working in the alcoholic drinks sector and looking for new opportunities, this might be something you want to explore. ParseR can help you understand your audience, uncover what they are talking about and generate best-in-class insights from any kind of text. Get in touch with us by email if you would like to know more!
Rose Pegler