A Social Media Representation of Craft Beer Among Different Cultures

Abstract

Craft beer consumption has increased in the last years, as well as the uses and habits associated to its consumption. This study proposes to explore craft beer representation through social media (SM), which could allow an understanding of the elements and structure of craft beer among different cultures, in a digital environment. Why? Because consumers do not behave equally in a physical versus digital environment. 

The study explored the craft beer - SM representation in six countries (Mexico, Colombia, Argentina, Chile, Peru, and Spain). The SM search used keywords related to “craft beer”. A pre-clean of the publications was performed, and for each country, a co-occurrence network was built based on the frequency of occurrence of the terms and their co-occurrence in the same post. The co-occurrence in each country was used to perform a Multidimensional Scaling (MDS) to understand the craft beer representation’ structure. Finally, the frequency of the terms was used to perform a Correspondence Analysis (AFC) followed by an Agglomerative Hierarchical Clustering to obtain a global map of the terms and their relationship with each country.

A total of 26149 posts were selected after the pre-cleaning process. The co-occurrence networks differed in each country, showing the importance of certain terms and how they are structured. Results from MDS and AFC showed several differences and similarities between countries. In general, the mentioned words were similar between the Latin American countries, being the highest similarities between Mexico and Peru. Some representative words for each country were also found (Mexico: home, mezcal; Argentina: enjoy, friends; Colombia: beverage, delicious; Chile: travel, IPA; Peru: food, celebration; Spain: ingredients, flavors), reflecting that culture influences our consumption habits, representations, and beliefs. Furthermore, this study demonstrates that SM could be used to cross-culturally and digitally, explore consumers’ representations of products-mainly in a changing digital environment.