COVID-19: 7 Unexpected Consumer Insights from Brandwatch

Like every other business, COVID-19 meant we had to quickly reassess our role in supporting our customers and prospects. For us, that meant building out a resource center that enabled us to share the latest consumer insights at scale and for free. For my team, it meant shifting our focus to creating daily bulletins for a rapidly growing list of subscribers, covering consumer insights across a whole range of different sectors and topics.

Here, I’m going to share some of the most unexpected insights we generated, mainly using social data (using our flagship social intelligence platform, Brandwatch Consumer Research) and survey data (using our mobile survey tool, Brandwatch Qriously).

1. Confidence in the safety of air travel is incredibly low

Our pulse check in mid-June found that consumers were still very hesitant to partake in a number of ‘everyday’ activities.

Using Brandwatch Qriously, we surveyed 3,085 adults from France, Germany, Spain, Italy, the UK, and the US through their smartphones and tablets, to find out what they felt safe doing. 

We learned that, as restaurants reopened, those with outside seating were likely going to fare far better than indoor-only establishments. While 36% of people feel safe dining outside, just 26% feel safe doing so inside.

It’s travel and tourism businesses that got the most discouraging results, though. Just 21% of our respondents said they feel safe going to a hotel, while only 15% said the same about getting on a plane.

2. Safety in store

In June, we wanted to find out which safety measures consumers were most concerned about. Using Brandwatch Qriously, we surveyed 4,092 adults from Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the United States through their smartphones and tablets.

The biggest consideration consumers reported when choosing whether to visit a store was the requirement to wear a mask.

The next two considerations in the ranking were around distancing and capacity – problems that are very difficult for businesses with small spaces.

But will consumers really not enter a store because they can’t socially distance or pay contactlessly?

For 34% of people, safety measures will be very important when deciding whether or not to visit a shop, although stores can apparently rely on 17% of their customers not caring about any measures at all.

With 75% of people picking options three to five on the scale of importance (one being not at all important), it’s clear that worries about safety measures aren’t just idle concerns. Their proper implementation could be make or break for many businesses in the coming months.

3. Happy holidays?

In another Qriously survey, we surveyed 6,917 consumers across Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, Spain, the UK and the US on their smartphones and tablets to find out how they were thinking about the holidays at the end of 2020.

Specifically, do they think they’ll be spending more, less, or roughly the same? For most consumers, it’ll be the same or less, with 45% and 44% of the responses respectively. It’s a pretty bleak picture.

Germany and France appeared to have the most optimistic citizens of the countries we studied – they were most likely to say they think they’ll spend more.

4. Sleep disruption and bad dreams

Using our Brandwatch Consumer Research platform, we looked for people talking about being unable to sleep and uses of #CantSleep on social media.

After COVID-19 was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization, mentions of trouble sleeping on social media rose sharply.

 

A lack of sleep wasn’t the only problem being reported. Back in April, we found upward of 40k mentions per day of strange dreams and nightmares.

Analyzing those dream mentions further, we found that a surprising number of the nightmares being discussed took place on cruise ships.

5. Shopping local becomes a priority

In May, we surveyed 6,915 people across Australia, France, Germany, Singapore, Spain, the UK, and the US to find out how their values around buying different products had changed since the outbreak began.

According to our survey, 33% of consumers think it’s more important that the things they buy are locally sourced now compared to before the outbreak.

Use of the hashtag #ShopLocal has also jumped during lockdown – there were more mentions of it in March and April 2020 than there were in November and December 2019 (Black Friday and holiday gift buying season).

6. Sports bettors have been trying their hands at the stock market

Online brokerages have had a record number of new accounts created this year, and the big four (E-Trade, TD Ameritrade, Charles Schwab, and Fidelity Investors) reportedly executed as many trades in March and April as they did in the whole first quarter of 2019. 

But we wanted to know what, and who, was driving this trend. So we used our Consumer Research platform to investigate English-language mentions of sports betting and daily trading on social media from January 2017 to May 2020.

Looking at the volumes over time, sports betting mentions slowed in early 2020, while trading has seen an uptick, suggesting that the latter hobby has overtaken the former in popularity.

We also found a massive uptick in search interest around the app Robinhood, a commission-free investment app that’s the hottest on the market. Marc Ribinstein, the newsletter writer of Net Interest, wrote: “43% of North American men aged 25-34 who watch sports also bet on sports at least once per week, and that’s the same group that has flocked to Robinhood.”

Many people have had to adapt to new hobbies to replace those that aren’t possible to partake in under lockdown. For sports fans, filling their time with bets on the stock market or penny stocks is an easy way to get a similar thrill to sports betting. 

7. Interest in the Occult Boomed During the Lockdown

Conversations around astrology and the occult have seen upticks during the lockdown, but perhaps the strangest data point we found was the rise in reported ghost sightings on social media.

Compared to last year, the March to May period saw 30% more people reporting ghost sightings on social media.

Whether this is caused by people spending more time at home watching spooky movies or hearing sounds they usually wouldn’t while out at work, the data speaks to the unsettling nature of lockdown.

Looking Back

Throughout our bulletins, we’ve covered everything from conventional business questions about consumer trust through to obscure new behaviors and experiences reported online (like ghost sightings). The data reflects a whole array of different consumer behaviors and aspects of online culture that have manifested in this unique time.

To get the latest, check out Brandwatch’s COVID-19 Resource Center.