Brandwatch Bulletin #134: A Fall Data Special

Data viz but make it autumnal.

23 September 2022

Feeling the urge to hole up in a cozy coffee shop in a big coat and wooly hat? You’re not alone. The fall season has arrived and people are more excited about it than usual, according to our research.

Let’s get to it.

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Scarves at the ready

Today is the first day of fall, if you consider the September equinox to mark the start of the season. You may have a different definition, but there’s no denying that in many parts of the Northern hemisphere, the autumnal vibes are very much present.

Temperatures are falling, the nights are drawing in, and, presumably, the viewing figures for Gilmore Girls (#TeamParis) are creeping up. So, grab yourself a massive cup of coffee as we take you through some fall data.

Fall posts fail to fall again

First let’s take a look at the volume of fall posts using Consumer Research. Here’s how the data looks going back to 2017.

As we reported in last year’s fall bulletin, interest in the season grew after the pandemic. That change has continued into 2022, and we can see throughout the year that more people post about autumn than they did pre-pandemic.

This year’s numbers are a marked increase on 2021’s too, breaking away as early as late July (the jump in early July mentions are due to the UK’s Boris Johnson saying he would stay on until autumn and then leave his post).

We should note, the above data doesn’t include the equinox-defined first day of fall data, as we don’t have all of today’s numbers yet. But we found that post numbers jump the day before too. If we compare across the years, it looks like fall posts are set to reach huge levels today based on yesterday’s data.

Is pumpkin spice losing its shine?

It’s impossible to separate pumpkin spice from fall. They go hand-in-hand, or at least have since a certain coffee chain started selling pumpkin spice lattes back in 2003.

Last year we also found that the online pumpkin spice conversation was peaking earlier every year. But things have changed this year.

In 2022, the peak came on August 30, nearly a week later than last year, bucking the trend significantly. This was the day our aforementioned coffee chain released their season spiced latte and, as with all previous years, this event sets the peak.

We can’t say why there was a shift this year, although a particularly hot summer may have played a part, but we can see how that’s affected the volume of pumpkin spice posts.

2022’s pumpkin spice peak was way above average, and 13% higher than 2021’s. Compared to the average after that, it’s mostly stayed in line.

But when we compare to 2021’s numbers, there has been a drop. For the August 22nd – September 22nd period, posts are down by 5% in 2022. It’s not a huge drop, but it shows how a big peak isn’t everything.

Having said that, Google searches for “pumpkin spice” are above last year’s, so maybe the novelty of posting about the flavor online is just wearing off.

Good soup, good times

When the leaves start to change color we start to crave soup. Well, soup data. We’ve been calculating the dates for soup season for years now, and it’s time for the latest update.

To figure out soup season, we collected all mentions of soup on Twitter, Reddit, and Tumblr posted between 2016 and 2021. We then calculated each day of the year’s average soup post count, and the average for all days across the year.

With data from all those years taken into account, we consider Soup Season to be the period when daily mentions consistently exceed the average (excluding drops over Christmas due to lower levels of social media use). When that stops, Soup Season has come to end.

Here are the results with the latest data included.

All that means Soup Season lasts for 171 glorious days. With 11 already gone, you best get to the kitchen and start catching up.

Autumnal emoji expression

To finish off, we wanted to find out what emojis we use most when talking about fall. To do this we simply found the top emojis in our fall mentions dataset, and excluded any generic or unrelated ones.

Here’s what we found out.

If we’re honest, we don’t think you could get a more fall-sounding list than the name column above. We guess it’s time to start preparing for Halloween.

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Stay safe,

The Brandwatch Bulletin team

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