SEATTLE -- Convenience-store rivalries are nothing new. For example, the Sheetz-Wawa fan rivalry is well known even beyond the chains’ markets. Now a survey by consumer behavior research firm Placed Inc. has added fuel to that fire by identifying the retailers that the 2016 presidential candidates' supporters are likely to visit, and c-stores figure prominently in that survey.
Placed measured the offline behaviors of nearly 2 million double-opt-in users to connect voting patterns to store visits to determine where supporters of Hillary Clinton, Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders might be found.
Across the top 10 businesses, Placed measured no overlap, highlighting the stark differences between each candidate's voters.
To map store visits to votes, Placed determined if its audience lived in a county that voted Republican or Democrat and assigned that party's primary winner to the users. Once assigned a candidate, Placed directly measured the business associated with the voter to identify businesses they were more or less likely to visit (compared to the U.S. population).