Mintel in the Media – this week's highlights

This week saw amazing global coverage for our very latest beauty trend “Kinetique” as Mintel’s Beauty & Personal Care team announced details of how both electricity and energy in beauty will drive innovation in 2012. News of this exciting new trend fast hit the headlines, making a huge splash globally across publications including the Cosmetic News Portal, Professional Beauty, GCI, Retail News, UK Packaging, Industry sourcing, Happi, Drug Store News, Reuters, Yahoo! Finance and Inside Cosmeceuticals.

It was also a fantastic week for our latest UK cider press release which caused an absolute storm in the media as we announced to the world that cider is consumed as much as lager. The report gained extensive coverage across the nationals including the Daily Mail and the Daily Telegraph which highlighted how cider’s “steep sales growth in the past five years is the direct opposite of lager’s equally sharp decline. Mintel’s Jonny Forsyth was quoted in many of the articles including AOL where he talked about how “Cider has been particularly successful at attracting younger drinkers from the ailing lager category, as well as from alcopops and wine,” he said the surprise cider surge is due to “a combination of impressive innovation and marketing nous”. The release also made it in to The Scotsman, The Sun, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Midweek Sport, Food Manufacture, Talking Retail, Retail Newsagent and TNT mag. News of its popularity then hit the airwaves on BBC radio Bristol and Gloucester. The story was also featured on the BBC News website which became the second most read story on the site.

On Wednesday, our very own beauty expert Vivienne Rudd was featured on prime time breakfast TV on BBC 1 where she discussed the success of nail bars and how having your nails done is now seen as an affordable treat. The story then went on to Red online.

Other big stories to hit the UK headlines include Mintel’s latest health & fitness research which featured in The Independent highlighting how research from Mintel indicates growing numbers of gym-goers are resolving to stay loyal to their clubs, with 11% actually planning to spend more on the leisure pursuit. Its latest research, conducted last month, questioned Brits about their leisure spend in the past 12 months. Still with The Independent our food and drink insight made it in to the article ”Homemade? I’ve had my fill of cupcake fetishism, twee polka-dot aprons and smug TV bakers.’ Mintel saw all this coming in a 2006 report, which predicted (warned?) that sales of home-baking products would reach £550m by 2011. By 2010 it had actually reached £576m, no doubt because of the 28 per cent of us baking from scratch using raw ingredients at least once a week.

Mintel’s Retail expert Richard Perks was quoted in The Times in an article titled “Gaming Giant turn their backs on Game” Richard was quoted as saying “How can Game survive this? Only a massive injection of cash will help and who will supply that?” Meanwhile our Kate Middleton story once again featured in the media, this time in Glamour saying “Retail analysts reported that Kate’ s impact on the British fashion industry has generated a £l billion boost to the economy and this figure was labelled “conservative ” by consumer analyst Alexandra Richmond, from Mintel”.

Finally, Mintel’s Amy Lloyd was quoted in The Grocer in an article titled Sharwood’s powering up with meal kit NPD talking about meal kits. Amy referenced the fact that about a third of British consumers used meal kits, but warned that families with children might be put off the Sharwood’s kits if they were too spicy. Meanwhile, in an article titled Viva Las Vegan! Top Sante Health & Beauty highlighted how more than half of the people in the UK are consciously choosing to eat meat free and dairy free food at least once a week.

Over in Austria, beauty was the topic of interest in Die Presse , while in France our latest beauty innovation research was featured in Special Chem in an article looking ahead to our presence at In-Cosmetics headlined: “In-cosmetics to Unveil Latest Trends & Revolutionary Cosmetic Ingredients in Barcelona.”

And over in the US press office, the week kicked off with a great story in the Chicago Tribune about credit card offers for college students that utilized Mintel Comperemedia credit card direct mail data. Additionally, we distributed a press release that quoted Senior VP, Mintel Comperemedia, Andrew Davidson about a rise in plain vanilla credit card offers. As a result we got several interview requests from journalists, resulting in pieces in Bankrate and PaymentsSource.

Meanwhile, journalists across the US lapped up our insight into the pet industry, as our data on the subject was used in articles appearing in The Washington Post, Bloomberg News, Time Magazine, The Boston Globe and the San Francisco Chronicle.

Next up our sales numbers for Yogi Tea were referenced by The Register-Guard while Modern Baking used our data about whole grain product launches and Supermarket News quoted senior health and wellness analyst, Molly Maier for a story about negative publicity in the supplement and vitamin market.

Other big news that got the media talking came from this week’s press release we put out on our Ethnic foods market report and quoted senior analyst David Browne. The story was picked up across the globe, appearing on Supermarket News, Restaurant Management, Food Business News, The Press-Enterprise and QSR Magazine.

Also of note, director of foodservice research, Eric Giandelone was quoted in a Convenience Store Decisions article about healthy menu items, as well as a piece in Nation’s Restaurant News where he discussed dessert trends.

Closing out the week. Mintel data was used in a Natural Foods Merchandiser story about vegetarian food, as well as three Nutraceuticals World stories about antioxidant product launches, trends in the soy market and the increasing popularity of dairy proteins.