#Snapchart: what’s behind this British love of bottomless brunches?

It’s no lie, us Brits love to drink - be it a cheeky pint after a long week at work, a classy gin & tonic to overcome those first-date nerves, or a glass of wine, well, just because why not.

That very love may have been the driving force behind a weekend ritual that has steadily increased over the last decade in the UK: bottomless brunches. Bottomless brunches are meals that come with unlimited alcoholic beverages, mainly ‘morning appropriate’ considered drinks such as Mimosas and Bloody Mary’s. Needless to say, this benefits both restaurant owners and drinkers, who form a merry bond for the morning (and sometimes afternoon). But what else is found behind the success of this formula?

We’ve used Pulsar TRAC to find out what’s going on around the topic of boozy brunches. Using Pulsar’s keyword analysis, we found that 67% of all tweets, photos and posts were dominated by brunchers talking about friends and family as the perfect excuse to drop those pennies.

So the first (and obvious) finding tied to this phenomenon is the social aspect. With everyone always getting busier and busier, and time becoming more precious, boozy brunches are the perfect excuse to be socially efficient: get out of bed, meet friends and continue the weekend celebrations. Gone are the lonely days of feeling guilt on a Sunday morning, as you shamelessly glug away whatever alcohol is left from the night before, just to relieve the mounting hangover (non-Brits, avert your innocent eyes).

Using Facebook Topic Data, we then looked at a breakdown of the audience demographic discussing the boozy brunch ritual online. What’s interesting is that whilst these types of brunches have become more mainstream, conversations in the UK related to it are still heavily dominated by women aged 25-34, even up till the ages of 54, which is almost 4 times that of men in total. Could this indicate that ‘brunch’ is still generally conceived as female thing? On average only 3.5% of posts are broadcasted by men in comparison to 29.8% by women (the rest of mentions are posted by bar and restaurant owners).

To investigate this further, we asked some of the lovely men at Pulsar: “Do you even brunch”? Pulsar's Research Director Giuseppe commented that although he loves to brunch, it just wasn’t that ‘cool’ to post about it afterwards. Meanwhile, Associate Director Rob highlighted that he would never go to brunch unless it was with his girlfriend, and if he wanted to booze he’d just visit his local pub. Well. We agree that's the tiniest sample, but so far it does appear to back up the data indeed...

Restaurant owners have also been able to capitalise on the growth and popularity of Instagram, which dominates social media in this category, as shown in our channel breakdown: Instagram has almost 90,000 posts in the space of 30 days, double that of any online channel.

By analysing pictures with our image analysis module, we found that basic brunch menus such as ‘eggs on toast’ or ‘the full English’ are no enough to make the cut on image-sharing platforms such as Instagram or Tumblr - it appears conventional just doesn’t sell these days!

What has replaced Ye Olde Fayre is a smorgasbord of unique, innovative and delectable plates to attract the growing demographic of foodies that use brunch as a way to rejoice and share these scrumptious moments. Alcoholic beverages appear to follow the same trend, with innovative cocktails being the most popular on Instagram – hardly anyone lifts an eyebrow at the sight of a Bloody Mary topped with either half a lobster or a bacon slider any more.

Lastly, for those of you who have already booked your flight to indulge in this favourite British pastime, your friendly Pulsar team have kindly made some suggestions for you using our geo-localised searches to identify the most popular destinations for boozy brunches. Some of these include hot spots around Clapham Common, Angel and Covent Garden. So with the weekend looming just around the corner, it’s time for you to pick up your phones and start making your reservations.

If you’re dizzy from all this talk about drinks, but interested in finding out more about what Pulsar and what it can do to help you understand relevant topics and audiences online? We’d love to hear from you: just drop us a line on [email protected].