Digital footprints of the US e-cigarette market: correlations among retail sales data, social media activity and Google search trends.

Résumé

INTRODUCTION: The global market for electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) has been changing rapidly. There is limited research on whether real-time social media activities and Google search trends could reflect the e-cigarette market.METHODS: Using retrospective US retail sales data (Circana) of four popular e-cigarette brands (JUUL, Puff Bar, Hyde and Elf Bar) every 4 weeks from May 2021 to January 2023, we examined their Spearman correlations with the Google search trends and social media (Twitter, Reddit and Instagram) mentions during the same period. We applied linear mixed-effects models to the pooled brands data to further examine the association between sales and online activities, accounting for both within-brand temporal correlation and between-brand variability in baseline sales.RESULTS: We observed strong positive correlations between retail sales and Google search trends across all four brands, with Spearman correlation r ranging from 0.59 to 0.99 (p