[photo by Ryan Ramplin, redditor and winner of our Premium Cigar Consumer Survey prize: a Dupont MaxiJet lighter]
We’d like to thank all the aficionados who participated in our Premium Cigar Consumer Survey, which we conducted starting in June 2014. We targeted premium cigar smokers from different social media platforms and fora. The objective of the survey was to gather market data to help shape the Cigar Sense service offerings we’ve been planning since early this year.
We received data from about 400 unique respondents, principally from the USA, and are pleased to share the highlights with you, as many respondents have inquired about the outcome. To be clear, this is an informal, unscientific survey and its responses do not represent a statistically significant sample of the millions of cigar consumers. Nonetheless, we found the responses interesting, and they did serve our market research needs.
Let’s review some of the data, starting with how long aficionados have smoked premium cigars. 41% of them have been smoking for 3-9 years:
The majority (52%) smoke weekly, 32% smoke daily and 9% smoke more than one cigar a day:
67% of the respondents consider themselves knowledgeable:
Not as many can regularly identify flavors when they smoke their cigar:
In all cases, flavor is a very important criterion for the selection or enjoyment of a cigar, with 87% of cigar smokers indicating that flavor is the most important factor in their choice of cigars.
The respondents use various sources of information for cigars they might want to try. The most commoly used are blogs/forums, followed by local tobacconists and printed magazines.
When aficionados try a new cigar recommended by their selected sources, 23% are extremely satisfied.
48% state that their advisor(s) understand their unique, individual preferences in cigars.
However, there is space for personalized expert recommendations fitting the unique preferences of aficionados: 52% of the respondents are very or somewhat interested in such service:
As a token of our gratitude, we promised to randomly award one respondent every two hundred valid responses we received. Ryan Ramplin has received this beautiful Dupont MaxiJet torch lighter:
The complete information collected via this survey will only be used by Cigar Sense and will not be sold to any third party.
EDITED 2018 : Cigar Sense is currently providing detailed, anonymized consumer preferences statistics available to manufacturers and distributors who are looking at better across the world.
