JMIR Publications

ABSTRACT

Background:

Identifying the existing brands in the e-cigarette market in the US is key to calculating the market share of different companies and their market power.

Objective:

To provide a database of e-cigarette brands to expedite e-cigarette market surveillance and help policymakers monitor market changes following regulatory actions.

Methods:

To facilitate the surveillance of the e-cigarette market and various product types that exist, we created a semantic database of e-cigarette brand names of 2020-2022 from multiple data sources, including: e-liquid brand data from online vape shops collected in 2021; disposable e-cigarette brand data from online vape shops collected in 2022; e-cigarette brand information from 2020 Nielsen Retail Scanner Data; a pre-existing list of e-cigarette brands on Wikipedia; self-reported brands from e-cigarette users in the US who participated in the 2020 International Tobacco Control Four-Country Smoking and Vaping (ITC 4CV) survey; and e-cigarette brands on Twitter from May 2021 to December 2021, published by Tang et al (2022).

Results:

In total, we identify 907 brands in our database that sell a variety of e-cigarette products through different channels (e.g., brick-and-mortar stores or online), such as e-liquids, pods/cartridges, disposables, devices, and starter kits. We also observe and document the top five e-cigarette brands by sales volume in counts in brick-and-mortar stores during 2020, the top five e-liquid brands by product frequency counts available in five popular online vape shops in 2021, as well as the top five e-cigarette brands by frequency counts in self-reported data from the ITC 4CV US 2020 survey.

Conclusions:

Continuous monitoring of existing e-cigarette brands is crucial for e-cigarette market surveillance, and our semantic database can serve as a useful research tool to assess manufacturers’ marketing behaviors.