What the latest PlayStation launch says about purchase intent
The PS5 has just been announced. Anne-Catherine is going to tell you why you should care.
It’s been a little while since you heard from the numbers girl at OneFifty (which we all are, but only yesterday I was called the analyst supremo – an exquisite club to be in). Enough words, as that clearly isn’t my strength… Let some numbers speak.
Yesterday, PlayStation revealed the new PS5 via social. And let me tell you, some of these stats will blow your mind.
The live event broke 1 million views on Twitch and 2 million on YouTube
4M users joined the Twitter conversation worldwide:
That’s a rocking 16M impressions & 7.1M Twitter mentions in a single day – more mentions than we saw for iPhone in the last 30 days 😳
The US and Japan both saw more than 800k mentions of PlayStation5 each
In Europe, France and the UK saw the biggest spike in conversation but lagged far behind Japan and the US (c. 200k Twitter mentions
What did we find interesting about it?
Are consumers hungry? I wouldn’t want to go as far as it’s a sign of an uptake in financial confidence, but a PlayStation is a non-essential good to purchase. Despite the PS5 hype, we still see fewer people talking about shopping for clothes (-60%) or buying electronics and gaming equipment (-46%) on social media compared to earlier in the year (April & May).
Fact or fad? Gaming is one category where it’s useful to study hypes vs purchase. We’re yet to see if hype turns into sales but similar analysis shows this is a lead indicator for purchase intent. Let’s see what happens to Amazon’s bestseller list later in the year when the PS5 goes on sale.
Are true friends never apart? Appreciate I haven’t completed a full-on research study, but it was notable (across the industries we work with) that some communities just seemed to have disappeared at the beginning of lockdown. I’m sure you’ve noticed that some of these so-called Fitness gurus on Instagram have vanished, while your favourite football club was there to stay. One trait that stands out for the gamer community is its densely connected network. In fact, they are 7-8 times more likely than the average Twitter user to know and follow each other. The most used term in how they describe themselves in bio descriptions is ‘fan’. What you might call just a’ bunch of nerds’ is actually a trait that makes them stick together even when the world is upside down.
And yes, to all the women out there: Men expect a PS5 when they can’t even buy us flowers LOL
If you’re interested in how we’re currently monitoring consumer confidence and how we track lead purchase intent indicators across different sectors on social, get it touch.
