The Trust Economy: How is the pandemic shaping consumers?

The Trust Economy: How is the pandemic shaping consumers?

For the past four years, including this time during the pandemic, InsightsNow® has been tracking a group of consumers we call Clean Label Enthusiasts™. This proprietary research community consists of a group of people who look at ingredients on the front and back labels​, have specific attitudes and beliefs about ingredients, buy products they perceive as being clean label​ and are enthusiastic to be consumer advocates for the food industry​. One of the most recent waves of our study looked at this group to truly understand what their new normal might be in today’s world and explore how this impacts consumer trust.

Our webinar “The Trust Economy: How is the pandemic shaping what we trust and the landscape of innovation opportunities?” explores some of the insights gathered, like what holiday plans might look like, what food habits are trending, and what motivates these consumers. In order to understand what is going on, we first look at some behavioral frameworks that uncover behavioral motivators. Most useful is looking at InsightsNow’s Emotions Insight Wheel™ where we can dig into functional, sensorial, social and psychological motivators—and how those motivators have changed in terms of product choice over the past 18 months.

What we’ve found is a significant emergence of trust as a key consumer motivator. The webinar goes on to cover how trust interacts with companies, government agencies, media and more. People have distinct points of view about responsibility and who to trust, and our study looked at federal regulatory agencies, food companies, farmers, family, doctors, and other parties when examining shifts and trends.

In order to understand how these insights are gathered, you can learn more in the webinar about Implicit Bias Research​ using The Implicit / Explicit Test™—a unique patent-pending approach from InsightsNow. “The Trust Economy: How is the pandemic shaping what we trust and the landscape of innovation opportunities?” talks about how the test was applied, and some of the results uncovered with our Clean Label Enthusiast community on a variety of topics.

Webinar presenter Dave Lundahl then shares some takeaways, including an increased focus on environmental concerns, a return to trust in government regulators, a higher level of trust uncovered for smaller brands, and that brands must align with consumers’ core values and provide consistent, continuous messaging through trusted sources to decrease implicit biases. 

Learn more about what this means for you by accessing the webinar here.