Transcript Courtesy of Focus Forward & FF Transcription

Melanie Courtright: Hi, everyone. It's two minutes past the hour and we have a full agenda, so I'm going to go ahead and get started. Thank you all very much for joining us today for In Place, On Edge: Consumers & the COVID-19 Crisis. Today, we're going talk a lot about consumer sentiment. We have some great speakers. First of all, for those who don't know me, my name is Melanie Courtright and I'll be your host today. I'm the CEO of the Insights Association and I'm really grateful for the opportunity to spend this time with you. I have a couple housekeeping things to cover. Standard quick disclaimer if you've joined these with us for the past few weeks, just a reminder that the things that we share today are not legal, methodological or financial advice; if you need those and you need to be connected with someone, please let us know and we'll connect you. We have a resource page on our website, the IA Coronavirus resource page. Also on this page is developing a great library of research on research. Much of it related very much to things we're going to talk about today. We'll be building this out even more over time and so if you haven't been there and you are looking for some specific piece of research, please go there and look. We would love to hear from you today. If you would like to ask a question, make a comment, share an insight, then just pop it into either the chat-box or the Q&A box and I'll be keeping an eye on that. We will be recording this and it will be available on our resource page as well as in an e-mail that we will send to everyone. If we don't, we will be asking questions, we'll have time at the end for Q&A, so feel free to pop questions into the Q&A box. If we don't get to your question, we'll do our best to follow up with you. So that is the housekeeping. I'm getting really good at doing that quickly. I would like to move on now to introduce our first speaker, Ujwal Arkalgud, he's the CEO and co-founder of Motivebase, an award-winning cultural anthropologist, best-selling author and entrepreneur, pioneer in the study of consumer beliefs, and his working in this area spans over a decade, he's an advisor to a handful of B2B startups, and he serves on the board for the Center for Food Integrity in the United States which is pretty cool. So with that, off to Ujwal for our first presentation.

Ujwal Arkalgud: Thank you, Melanie. Hello, everybody. So what you're going to see over the next few minutes is an anthropological examination of the potential areas of long-term impact of the COVID-19 crisis. As a team of anthropologists, our focus was really on trying to get beyond the dominant signals – dominant discourse that's taking place around COVID-19. Obviously as you all know the dominant discourse revolves around the obvious issues, the obvious meanings around COVID-19, whether it's symptoms or dealing with the healthcare sector and so on and so forth. What we wanted to really get at is the early signals of change that sit on the outer periphery, the outer walls of the contextual boundary, if you can kind of imagine that, because that's what gives us an idea of some of the broader, long-term shifts that a crisis like this, and I would call it a cultural crisis like this, would have on consumers and on people in general just in terms of having potential changes in our habits, decision-making process, and of course, the underlying belief systems that drive our decisions in our lives on a day-to-day basis. That's really the approach we've taken here and when we examined some of these early signals of long-term change, we saw six major demand spaces or six major opportunity areas, let me call it that. In particular, I'm going to focus on three here in the interest of time and expediency, but I want to give you a quick sense of what these six are. The first is this area of luxury goods and services, very interesting. In essence the consumer's definition of what they consider luxury is starting to change, and I'm saying starting because we're seeing some early signs of this, obviously, it is still early days, but we are seeing some changes in the underlying meanings of what people consider to be luxury. Corporate responsibility, very interesting. It dovetails nicely with an increase distrust in the government, for the American consumer, which leads to a greater sense of responsibility or greater expectation from what corporations need to deliver. Mass production, another really interesting demand space. In essence, changing meanings around what people consider to be mass-produced goods and solutions and how people may want to reduce their consumption of mass-produced goods in the post-coronavirus world. Environmental threats, this is a really fascinating one which really revolves around people trying to control their indoor air quality. I'll get into that. And then a couple of other areas. Immune health, sounds obvious, but actually really revolves around this doubling down on the holistic aspect of immune health rather than the pharmacological. And then of course the last area of impact which really revolves around mental wellness and mental well-being. Now I'm going to focus on three and I'll start with the changing definition of luxury. So what you're going to find first and foremost, and the screenshots you see, by the way, come from our technology MotiveBase and there is an attachment available that you can take a look at later in terms of the methodology if you're curious. But I want to focus on the insight here which really revolves around the changing definition of luxury and in particular, the refocus on sensory experiences as being a primary driver of luxury. This is really interesting. Obviously you can chalk this up to people missing out on their ability to go to a nice restaurant or enjoy a nice meal with their loved ones and their friends and so on, but ultimately a refocus on sensory experiences as a better definition of luxury and then in particular around the connection to food we saw discussions about food miles which for the first time shows us a greater awareness of the supply chain around food itself. Again, something that we have been tracking for a while. Obviously, these aren't new trends, but certainly seems like they're undergoing some form of acceleration because of this. Related to that, we're also seeing some initial signs of a resurgence of organics. Again, all of these sit within the broader, new emerging definition of what people consider to be luxury. Now, this is not to say as you'll see on the next slide, it's not to say that people aren't interested in luxury goods anymore, this is not to say that people aren't interested in buying that Prada bag. That hasn't changed, but there are some new expectations that are starting to get attached to the idea of luxury, obviously, in terms of sensory experiences and in terms of goods and services. And the greater focus on environmental and social issues is suddenly slamming the brakes on – or seems to be slamming the brakes on this growing interest in luxury goods. Again, this is something we'll have to wait and watch to see what the long term impact of this will be but certainly an early signal and early indication of a reconfiguration of how people consider – or what people consider luxury in their lives. The next demand space is about the changing culture of immune health. Now I'm going to go beyond the obvious here – obviously immunity has a direct relationship to COVID-19, but really what this is showing us is that people's distrust for government and the health or the medical industrial complex, I'm going to call it that, is increasing so heavily that people are starting to double-down even more so on holistic health than before. In a post-coronavirus world, we can already see much a greater interest in the holistic side of health and well-being; and when I say holistic, obviously, this could include and has an impact on a whole host of things, everything from sleep through to mental well-being, through to obviously natural ways to improve the amount of nutrition one is getting and one's immune health and so on and so forth. And obviously a lot of the new and emerging tools, whether it's DNA testing kits or the ability to look at and understand your own personalized health profile, all of these things will come into focus as well. And again on the next slide, you'll see the massive growth curve that this is suddenly showing, again, an early indication of a refocus on doing whatever's necessary to improve my immune health, but again, by looking at the natural side of health and well-being, obviously, it has massive impact on the health-wellness industry, but also on the food and beverage industry. The next demand space is about – and the last one I'm going to cover today is about the changing expectation of air quality. Really interesting trend or sub-trend. For those of you who have been following this trend, you may have noticed that it hit a bit of a ceiling last year. There was sort of this increased focus on indoor air quality and then it sort of slowed down, if you will. Now there's this renewed energy towards this and you could chalk that up to people trying to control their home environment as much as possible since they can't control what's outside. But you see terms or topics like secondary infection, secondary bacteria, respiratory problems. These are all examples of topics that people are using to discuss how they can potentially do damage limitation when they're at home. Focus very much is on science and innovation here in order to feel a sense of empowerment when you're at home, control my home environment as much as possible, refocus on the things I can do to improve indoor air quality. And again on the next slide you'll see the curve there with a growth projection, again, something that did not exist a mere three months ago, now suddenly there's a re-invigoration and a renewed energy in this particular area with people really focused on finding innovative ways. Now of course this has opportunities or implications for the air purification industry, but it also has immense implications for the cleaning industry because people are connecting indoor air quality to cleaning products, and of course right now people are doing whatever they need to do, but the moment people feel like they're on the other end of this, there's going to be an extra investment to fix whatever air quality issues I have created because of the products I'm now having to use at home. So it has immense implications there, plus implications for the home lifestyle categories, everything from the types of plants you can keep in your home to diffusers and everything in between. Again, some really interesting early developments of some major micro-cultures, as we call them, of impact that are showing us where the long term direction could be as we come on the other end of this crisis, hopefully.

Melanie Courtright: Great, thank you very much for that. We have some questions that are coming in, but everyone will be taking the questions at the end. Next up we have Will Leach. Will Leach is the founder of TriggerPoint, a leading behavioral research and design consultancy. Will spent over 20 years in behavioral science, insights experience and as a behavioral design instructor at the Cox School of Business. He's also the author of Marketing to Mindstates. Will, off to you.

Will Leach: Hello, everybody. Let me start off. I love sessions like this because I like to see other companies and what they're doing and starting to see collaboration, and also we're seeing similar things, so I think I'm going to echo some of the same things that Ujwal talked about. The first thing is I'm going to talk about messaging and the importance of changing and modifying messaging in a timely way, which is right now, this mass uncertainty. So if you want to understand how to tweak messaging because you want to influence a decision, you better understand decision making. And we have a model that we use to understand decision making, and we can use this model to influence the messages that we communicate to our customers. The first thing is understanding people's goals and those are lower functional goals and then higher order goals, it's just understanding and helping people identify where they want to go, basic goal theory. After that, we want to understand what motivates them to reach those goals. That's motivational psychology, and you can read things like from Deci and Ryan or you can read things from Moskowitz to understand a little bit more about psychological, or motivational psychology. The third thing you want to do is think about how people approach their goals. People either seek to maximize gains or minimize losses, that's regulatory fit theory. This starts to help you understand how to frame up the benefits of your product or your service. And lastly, behavioral economics, this idea of understanding decision making in creating shortcuts in your messaging. But why do you do this? Why would this matter to you outside of just having some insights? The reason why it matters is that if you do this well, if you are able to activate on somebody's goals, prime a psychological motivation, use regulatory approach to re-frame your brand and possibly drop in a cognitive heuristic, you're able to increase emotional arousal or hot state, and when people are in hot states, they're more susceptible to behavioral marketing. So that's the reason why we want to understand these factors. So let's start off here, and just say the last month has just changed how everybody and every brand is perceived psychologically. If you want to go the next slide, Melanie. Not surprisingly, understanding the subconscious mind states and how to activate on these mind states are really, really important in this new world. Right? So a mind state – you may say, what is a mind state? Well, mind state, think of it as the science behind the emotional marketing. When people talk about emotional marketing, guys, there is science behind it. Lot of motivational psychology, in fact. Mind state marketing is significantly more effective because it engages a system on heart, but also that mind, that system to mind. What I like about this type of messaging is that it's really timely, so I'm not suggesting that you guys go out and change your brand identities. If you're a brand marketer on the phone, you have been waiting for this day your entire career because now you have now stand for something, hopefully, in people's minds and you built trust, that's your whole goal with everything you've done for the last decade. What I am suggesting though is understand the timeliness of a message now and integrating a possible mind state message that will connect to that heart and the mind, in a way that makes your brand pop to people what they already understand about you. Next slide. So you guys know that the last month has changed everything about specifically goals that people have. So we have these political, economic, and biological forces that have created this mass uncertainty, and because of this mass uncertainty, we saw an incredible spike in research that we conduct all the time for our clients. So under times of mass uncertainty, we're finding, especially right now, there are these spikes in people's goals. If you want to go ahead to the next slide, there we go. And I'm going to tell you now, so this happened, literally, on – really we saw the biggest spike on March 12^th. That was the morning after President Trump was on TV and he said "We're going to stop flights and travel from Europe." And my jaw dropped, and immediately I said "We're going to need to pull data, right now." Because when you see that kind of significant impact in the economy, I just couldn't wait to see the data, and we saw across three different industries' goals, regardless of category, started popping; and the goal's very much like Ujwal talked about with safety. People, all of a sudden, about – categories that really aren't driven by safety, all of a sudden, people are talking about the safety and being safe. Another one that we saw was control. And what people are talking about in control is this idea of "Do I have a job?" The forces right now make people feel like they have no control on their lives. "Do I have a job?" "Are my kids going to go to school?" "How do I get bread and food?" "How do I get to the grocery store? Am I allowed to even drive?" So all of these questions create this desire for "I just don't want to lose any more control." And the third thing we saw, almost immediately, and it's even getting – it's spiking even higher now, is this desire for release, especially in the home. So right now, our homes are our sanctuary for everything, right? We shop from our homes now, it becomes our church, it's our office, it's our restaurant, it's our school, it's our entertainment hub, it's everything. And what people are using their home for, their goal is to use their home as a sanctuary to isolate themselves from all of the bad, whether it's physical bad, kind of in the safety space, and psychological harm, kind of turning-off-the-news, and people are seeking just greater moments of release and relaxation. So these goals directly link back to subconscious mind states, the way you should message to goals. It's the first part of that model that we talked about. So there are some people, as it relates to safety, we call that in my world the "cautious security mind state" and that's the desire to avoid anything that's going to cause harm, and that harm, like I said, it doesn't have to be physical harm, but that's really spiking on everything, but there's also this desire for emotional harm, protecting my child from being too overwhelmed by the situation, things like that, so that's called "cautious security" in our world. When people desire control, it's around cautious empowerment. We call it the "cautious empowerment mind state" and this is the desire to avoid anything that will take any more control away from us. So people are cautious in that this idea of like "I just don't feel like I have any control, how can I eliminate things that can take even more control out of my world?" So it's a cautious way of approaching control. And then the last one is this desire – when people desire greater release, we call that the "optimistic engagement mind state" so this is people are asking for brands and categories to provide greater intensity of a release, of a moment in the home, or at least the number of relaxing moments. And so my point that I want to make for you guys today was understanding that your brand can halo these things. I don't care what brand you are, I don't care what category you're in because I'm seeing across all different verticals, we're seeing across lots of verticals. And what I think we have to do is in a timely way identify can you play in providing somebody a feeling of safety, a greater sense of control, or greater releases in the home. And if you can identify that, then you have new messaging criteria, not to re-frame your brand in a drastic way, but small psychological cues you can place into your website right now, today, to provide that sense of emotional release or greater control, and it'll just make you pop and make you become more salient in what people truly desire at this time. So what I've done is – that's a lot to take in. We have free resources to help you go through understanding these three mind states, so if you want to text MINDSTATE-IA. Be careful on your spell check, guys, because some phones will spell check that to "is" so, I-A to 43506 or just contact the mind state group, and we can send you a webinar and some presentation decks that go a lot deeper into this stuff and thanks a lot for having me.

Melanie Courtright: Thank you very much, Will. Next up is Chris Jackson. Chris is the senior vice president and lead for the Ipsos public polling practice in the United States. His research specialties include public opinion trends, election polling, strategic communication research, and reputation research. He works with a wide variety of public and private sector clients including media partners like Reuters, USA Today, ABC News, and he's a spokesperson for Ipsos public affairs in the US. Chris, off to you.

Chris Jackson: Greetings, thanks. It's great to be with everyone. I wanted to take a few steps back and provide this group with some of the data we're collecting regarding the public response to this outbreak. Ipsos, if you don't know, we're a multinational research firm. We're working around the world, we've been tracking public responses to the coronavirus outbreaks since early February and multiple countries around the world and here in the United States certainly since late February/early March. We are one of the most active research companies on the issue right now with public opinion research, including today we actually released two separate polls covering two different aspects of the issue with ABC News, Good Morning America, and USA Today; both came out this morning. But what I wanted to focus on really was the consumer response to this outbreak in the United States and just how significant it is, because I think if you don't have this in your mind, you're not really going to be playing to what the public is really experiencing and what the public is understanding. So on the screen right now is our consumer confidence tracker. We've been tracking American consumer confidence for almost 20 years. And from the beginning of March to the end of March, we saw an almost 20 point decrease in consumer confidence in our index. That is the single largest single time period change we've ever seen in our tracker. It is more significant than any single point in time change that we saw during the great recession in 2008 and 2009. And while consumer confidence did ultimately get to a lower place during the great recession, it did that across essentially a two-year period, rather than over what is functionally a three-week period. So this is a massive, massive, massive shock to the American system, the likes of which has probably not been experienced in multiple generations, probably since World War II; and this is essentially going to be the environment within which we're operating for the foreseeable future. The one thing that is interesting to note though is we just collected a new week of data on this consumer confidence tracker this week, and it's relatively flat from where we were last week, so it does appear we're starting to hit some sort of potentially temporary equilibrium, but American consumer confidence has definitely fallen and there's definitely this reassessing with what's happening. And if we start to dis-aggregate consumer confidence to some of the component measures we're feeding into it, we're seeing that reflected in a couple of different ways. This shows the trend line for our overall index in yellow and then the trend line for two of the components, people's comfort making major purchases and people's comfort making household purchases, major purchases being things like a car or a house, a mortgage, things like that, and household purchases being groceries, supplies like that. And we've seen a precipitous drop on all of these metrics over the last few weeks since the beginning of the month of March. I'm showing you the net scores here so that's essentially the number of people saying they're comfortable versus – minus the people saying uncomfortable. And you saw the household purchase jumped from +15 at early March when people were essentially viewing the coronavirus outbreak as something potentially scary, but also something potentially happening over there, not here, to a -32 now which is, again, the most significant single-time period drop we've ever seen. These numbers have also stabilized a little bit from last week, though they're also still trending down slightly, but what we're seeing is a much more precarious public right now, that is not nearly as confident in what's happening, not nearly as confident in their finances, their ability to make purchases, their ability to afford things. And before we go to the next slide, I just want to add a little bit of additional context to this; because it's not something that's being experienced equally across different aspects of this socioeconomic status. Our Axios polling that came out on Wednesday, our Axios/Ipsos coronavirus index, actually digs into how people who are upper-middle class and upper class, affluent, highly educated are able to essentially continue on with their lives to some extent. They're working from home, they're working remote, they're able to get most of the things that they sort of want delivered to them, maybe with some delays, maybe with some shortages or some substitutions, but they are, more or less, experiencing the life that they have experienced before, in a large regard. Whereas people who are middle class and working class are either being laid off of their jobs as retail and service places close, or being forced to continue sort of going out in the world and sort of exposing themselves to the virus. Now, it's interesting though that with those data points, it's actually the upper middle class and upper class people who are reporting greater emotional distress, even though they're the ones who are actually more protected, but there's very much a very clear difference in how this is being impacted. And I think it's being driven by a couple of things, if we'll go to the next slide. As we've seen this progress, there has been a really sort of clear supply chain issue, where people are really struggling to get access to some staple goods, and it became particularly acute mid-March. You can see here, this is the number of Americans who say they went to try to buy toilet paper, hand sanitizer, or soap, and were unable to get it, unable to find it, unable to buy it, unable to access it. And you can see, at sort of the worst, 37 percent of Americans said they were unable to purchase toilet paper, 40 percent of Americans said they were unable to purchase hand sanitizer in the March 20-23^rd, which is sort of the real inflection point for society, where it sort of switched from being a threat that was sort of happening over there, to an immediate threat. That's when a lot of the sort of stay-at-home things really started coming about. And then that's starting to sort of gradually decline as we're moving forward. This is from our Axios/Ipsos Coronavirus Index, we're tracking this weekly, we'll have another update of this next week. And then, when we looked at what behaviors are being done, we're seeing increasingly significant social distancing behaviors or actions. As of this week, as of Monday, 53 percent of Americans say that they are self-quarantining, they are not going out and exposing themselves to the world except for very limited aspects. And that's being done through a number of different ways, where lots of people are saying they're canceling or skipping large gatherings, they're canceling travel, and then you also see it in sort of the very precipitous declines in people engaging in social interactions, going out to eat dropping from 56 percent early in the month to 13 percent now, visiting friends or family, 48 to 23, visiting elderly relatives, 17 to nine, as people are increasingly isolating themselves to fight this pandemic. And then, it's also having an impact on the economy and on work life, and this has actually started to stabilize a little bit. So we're still seeing the social individual level changes accelerating as the country inequally sort of embraces social distancing, but a lot of the business effects really kicked into place in that March 20-23^rd time period, and then has started to normalize at this sort of new, exaggerated level. I think the thing that's most interesting to focus on is, in the middle of this particular chart, where we see 42 percent of American workers are working from home, and 20 percent of American workers say that they've been furloughed, 16 percent say that their businesses have shut down completely. Now, you see, I think it was close to 10 million people over the last few weeks have filed for unemployment – that's coming from that 16 percent of employers who've shut down their businesses. Really stark, major, major impacts on what we're seeing in the economy, and this is essentially going to be the reality Americans are facing for a pretty significant time. We actually have, in our recent ABC News polling, that many Americans don't expect to be able to get back to their normal lives until after July, so months and months from now. Some expect it to go until the end of the year. And health experts, there's a lot of ranges, but Americans are sort of buckling down for this for the long-term, so I think it is important to really be able to start to come to grips with what American society looks like, and this data is starting to provide that standpoint. Thank you.

Melanie Courtright: Thank you very much, Chris. Next up, we have Jackie Lorch. Jackie is VP of Global Knowledge Management at Dynata, working with a team of researchers to maximize research quality and best practices. She is a frequent writer and speaker, and she is going to be talking to us about the Dynata sentiment tracker that they've been running. Jackie?

Jackie Lorch: Thank you, and it's great to be here together, to talk about research issues, and to share some data, and I think as Ujwal said at the beginning, we're all – and Will said too – we're playing off each other, we have echoes in each other's work of similar themes and questions. We've been running a 13-country tracker for the past several weeks, and I'm going to be showing you results, mostly from the week of March 23^rd, but also updating you with information from the results from this week that just came out of field. And I can tell you, in our study, the headline from the week really is that the US was waking up to the reality of the crisis in many ways. They're out of step with many of the other countries who have been more aware for longer, and we saw much more change and deeper levels of worry in the US compared to other countries, and also greater behavior changes. So when we look at the economy – we're looking here at my own financial situation on the left, and then my own country's domestic economy, and the world economy – we're seeing much more worry about the broader world economy, and we expect to see that change as people start to worry more about the precariousness of their own financial situation, and we have seen a rise, this week, in that too. When we look at purchasing and lifestyle, you're looking here at the American economic worries, and you see it rising and rising again this week, as I said. When we turn to purchasing and lifestyle, we're seeing in our research this week that people in America are much more worried about food supplies this week than they even were last week – it's gone up to 43 percent extremely or very worried, compared to a third the week before. And half, over half say they're still stockpiling on food. However, I like to note the inverse of that – we hear so much in the media about everybody's out crazily at the stores – half the people are not stockpiling on food, according to our data. It's likely that most trips have already been canceled by now, but in the US especially, more than other countries, we still see people continuing to say, "I just canceled a trip," so I think there is the growing awareness that it is going to take longer, and that those summer trips are probably not going to happen. Americans say that they're starting to shop online more – over half are saying they're doing this now more than they ever did before, higher than we're seeing in other countries across the globe. And actually, this metric seems to be going in the opposite direction in China, as China starts to cautiously reopen, people are not telling us that they're shopping more online than they had previously. One key question that we have is a question we asked about your willingness or your intention to make a non-essential purchase, and we've seen a rise in that metric. People are telling us, "I'm going to put off non-essential purchases." It makes sense now, but we think this is an interesting potential leading indicator as we start to get back to normal, that we will continue to track. We also wanted to talk about some societal changes. As we know, people are much more nervous now about touching strangers – this has risen greatly in the past week in the US. Nearly 60 percent now say that they're reluctant to touch strangers or friends as much as they did before, even family members. And Ipsos has a similar question here about visiting elderly relatives. Our question is worded a bit differently – we're asking, are you doing this less than you did a few weeks previously? So half the people in the world are saying, "I am putting off visits to elderly relatives more than I did previously." US has been lagging on this, they were still visiting elderly relatives, only a third were doing that less often. We expect to see a change there in the coming weeks in the US, as again, the US wakes to the realities. We wanted to ask a broad, societal question about whether, in these kinds of situations, should we be putting our own self-interest first, or thinking about the common good? Now, of course we all know the social desirability issue when we ask that kind of a question, but we still think it's an interesting question to track. Academics that study this talk about how the desire to protect other people is a big motivator for thinking about putting the common good first, so really high numbers, even in Italy, who's been suffering in the depths of this crisis for a long time – four out of five say it's more important to put the common good first. So we will continue to track that one. And then, you see the spread here, quite similar scores worldwide on putting the common good first. Last one, when is it going to end? A really important question to track and see the differences. When you look at this kind of chart, what we're going to see is, on the left is the more optimistic, or hopeful viewpoint, by country. So the countries that are on the left here are more hopeful or optimistic, those on the right are less so. Canada actually matches the average perfectly, so much so that we had to go back and look at the data several times, because we couldn't believe how much it matched, but it's a perfect match to the average here. So the countries on the left that are more optimistic may have different reasons for that – in Spain, they had a really difficult time for a long time, they may be feeling that it must be coming towards the end. China, we're not surprised that we see them on the left side of the curve here. The US is, I think, going to be moving towards the right before it moves to the left. In other words, they're perhaps overly optimistic, and not recognizing the reality, and that's why they're in that optimistic group. Again, Italy's on that optimistic side too. So the summary findings for when it's going to end – hopes it's going to end in a month are down to single digits, not surprisingly, Americans have been more optimistic about when it will end, but I think that's going to change. Three-quarters say that life will be back to normal within a year, so that's where we are now, and we will be interested to track this weekly as time goes on. So in the last couple of minutes I have, I wanted to address with you the two questions that we most often get asked. The first one is, are people still taking surveys? And my colleague Pete Cape has been writing a series of blogs about this, and he keeps making the point that it can really help us to think about [INAUDIBLE sounds like: tallies] as people, when we think about these issues. How many people do we personally know who have symptoms, or who are very sick? So we can start to think about, most of us we know have changed our lives, but we're still able to do our normal tasks and duties, and most people have a survey-taking habit, they take the survey at a certain time, usually it's home, not out and about, so we don't expect to see big changes there. And then what about B2B? Obviously, the majority of people now working from home – well, almost all B2B surveys are, in fact, taken at home. We have the home email address of the person, so we don't expect to see that change either. However, we need to be sensitive, obviously, about who we interview, not interviewing certain groups like healthcare workers, although it can be appropriate to continue to research in specialties where they're not directly impacted, and all their routine appointments have been canceled, so it really depends on the target audience. So, we're in a global pandemic, and people are worried and emotional, and Pete is urging us, as survey writers, to take more time in how we create our surveys – be sensitive to people's feelings. And then lastly, in the last minute here, will people answer the same? Will my data change? It depends what you mean by 'the same' – people will tell us what's real and true for them, and we've been asked if we should ask a hypothetical question, "Try and answer this question without thinking about COVID." It's just really difficult for people to do that, answer a hypothetical. So answers will probably change, but people can still answer objectively about things like household appliances, that they're interacting more with these days than they normally are, and we can't predict how people's answers are going to change. So looking ahead, will people stay with online shopping? We need to keep tracking their experience with online shopping now, so that we understand the changes as we come out of this. People are using new brands, because they don't have access to the brands that they normally have. What are their experiences? We need to keep tracking that. So there are new questions to ask, and maybe even new trackers to start in the middle of this, and we really believe now is not the time to lose touch with our customers.

Melanie Courtright: Thank you, Jackie, appreciate it. And so next, I'm super excited to introduce to you Michelle Gansle, from Mars. Michelle is the Director of Consumer Insights at Mars, with 20 years of experience in marketing, marketing research, and business development, mostly focused in consumer packaged goods. Welcome, Michelle, and thank you for joining us. Can you tell us what you're seeing in sentiment, what you're doing in the sentiment world at Mars these days?

Michelle Gansle: Yeah. So I guess I'm lucky that I'm in a centralized Mars role, and I sort of raise my hand to help steer point of view on COVID, and I think what's been really great is everyone's been really quick to react to the situation, and while it's clearly not – I mean yes, it is a crisis, but it's also, if we're honest with ourselves, an insights person's dream – sociological, psychological, human impact, this is our time to shine as insights professionals, so in that regard, it's exciting. I think one thing that has been great is all of the suppliers quick to move on it, and share perspectives. The other side of that is that, individually, I'm sure my peers can relate, we're getting hundreds of emails a day with varying perspectives, and not only we're getting it, but our stakeholders are getting it too, so a lot of our job is trying to be the guardian of centralizing all that, and coming out with a clear perspective, because a lot of the material, while helpful, it all says the same thing. We need to get from 'what' to 'so what,' so a lot of my time has been spent trying to get to a centralized point of view on what's the 'so what' for us. I think the other thing is, everyone's hyper-focused on what's happening right now, and we need to start focusing on what does new normal look like, so that question of when will we get there – Bain has been putting out a lot of great resources on how do you think about scenario planning for when we'll get there, and then once we're there, what does that mean? What trends are going to stay the same and sustain, and what trends will change, or revert back? So I feel like that's also an opportunity where we could be focusing more on the future, and not only just focusing on what's happening right now.

Melanie Courtright: That's great. So in the Mars world, what, if you can share, what's increasing, what's decreasing, what's changing in your role compared to where it was three months ago, that might linger?

Michelle Gansle: Yeah. I won't speak for the whole industry, but I know I'm in regular contact with my CPG peers, and pretty much all of us have stopped research, except for with exception – so we ask ourselves, is it urgent, and is it critical, first and foremost, and do we believe that the results will be safe and reliable? So if associates can answer yes to all of those, then we'll still consider, but most of the work we're doing right now is about any kind of in-context, in-moment research, so like what Jackie was saying, trying to understand how consumers are relating to communication, or positioning our work, as it relates to right now, in the moment of COVID. We have found, through triangulating between work Nielsen's done, Zapit’s [ph] done, and BASES, that consumers don't seem to change their perception on innovation testing. If we look at concepts before COVID and during COVID, they're with a 90 percent confidence answering in the same way, so we feel comfortable that they can think about the future, and reliably and honestly react to the future, which I think was a little bit of a surprise for us. I think we expected to see very skewed results, and we're not seeing that. So week by week, we're looking at addressing the situation, and updating our research guidelines, but largely, we're asking people, unless it's urgent and critical, or it's about in-moment, in-context, to not do research right now, and shifting our energies to either focusing on a point of view on COVID, and what should the business do now and in the future, or working on longer-term projects that aren't being impacted right now.

Melanie Courtright: Yes, so we had a question that was submitted early on from one of the registrants, specifically the type of work that's being postponed or canceled outright, and so I think you've answered that. In-moment, in-context research goes on, but things that can wait, or that might be affected by the current environment sort of is put on hold. What keeps you and your colleagues up at night right now, from an insights perspective? Maybe not from a personal perspective, we probably could all answer that pretty quickly, but in the insights world, what are you worried about the most?

Michelle Gansle: I don't know if it's worry, but I think the biggest concern is this is unprecedented for most of us in our lifetime, so trying to give guidance on scenarios and what new normal would look like, we're clearly all guessing, we're trying to use the past to help make recommendations for the future, but we're making big, multi-million dollar decisions off of scenarios that are largely guesses. I think, on the positive side, a lot of us in the industry are going through digital transformation, and trying to transform the way the research tech tools we use, the way we partner, the type of value that we create, and what I've seen in our companies, this is massively accelerating that, by necessity, by the fact that people are getting more comfortable with digital ways of working and technology, so I think this is a real positive for our industry, that this is potentially opening up permission to accelerate comfort around things like research tech tools.

Melanie Courtright: Yep. What about, were you doing much in-person, and if you were, maybe not, but if you were, did you move any of it into digital modes?

Michelle Gansle: Yeah, we don't do a ton of in-person. The most amount of in-person things we do tends to be either ethnography or when you're co-creating with consumers, but to be honest, all those things can be done online, so I'd say Mars is historically, we've relatively stopped doing focus groups many years ago, and when we do ethnography, a lot of times that's digital already, so we haven't been super affected by the in-person things. Shop-alongs, obviously, that's impacted, or we've also stopped doing any kind of consumer in-home use tests, where we send products, so those types of things are being impacted. But I think it's also spurned a lot of innovation on how we do think about and do research. So that's a tale of two cities, I suppose.

Melanie Courtright: If you could give a core piece of advice, and maybe it's around all the noise you're getting in the space right now, but a core piece of advice to all the partners that you have out there in the research world – and everybody's scrambling to put information in front of you – if you could give sort of a request, or a core piece of advice to everyone listening, what would it be?

Michelle Gansle: And again, I won't speak for all of my colleagues, but I will speak for my personal experience, that [AUDIO SKIPS] I think if you could take a little bit of extra time to try to just to take categories of the people you're talking to, to not just have a broad statement, "Consumers are stockpiling," but taking one step further to say, we think this is what this could mean for chocolate, for pet care, because even within our own Mars businesses, the impact is very different. That would be helpful. I think the other thing is, for the ones where you have relationships, picking up the phone, having a phone call, I know people are very worried about what does this mean, is this research all going away, will research pick back up? I believe that it depends on which categories the people are in, but in some categories, business is booming, and some were really struggling [AUDIO SKIPS] from a budget perspective, but I know right now, it seems like professionals are looking towards resuming research as soon as possible. So I think have those frank and honest conversations where you have a relationship. Where you don't have relationships, cold calling – tough right now. With everything going on, I'm not likely to have a cold call conversation, so I think focus your efforts on nurturing relationships that you have, and think twice, is this piece of work that I'm about to send out about COVID incremental and different than the 20 other pieces that other suppliers have sent? If it is, awesome, but if it's not, if you weren't the first to get it out, is that helpful and useful, or just causing noise?

Melanie Courtright: That's great. Well, I want you to know that my household didn't stockpile a lot, but I did stockpile candy bars, so they're a very important part of my joyful moments at home. I think one of the releasing event, that when things get stressful, I go have a candy bar, so thank you for that.

Michelle Gansle: We appreciate it. Well, gum is also used for stress release, I'll just put that out there.

Melanie Courtright: Very good, very good for stress. Well, let's open it up to some broader Q&A, and again, if you have some questions, feel free to drop them in. I've asked a couple that were on here. I thought I might give Will and Mindstates a chance to sort of talk about this concept of what's the difference between manipulation and marketing and messaging, that is in the thread?

Will Leach: So sorry if anybody on the phone took offense or even the idea that what we're proposing is manipulation. I tell all my clients, and I think all my clients would echo this, is that it is in nobody's best interest on any brand to figure out ways to psychologically manipulate people. You may get one sale, and I can agree, I can scare you into getting a sale, but I can tell you, you will long-term hurt your brand dramatically. So that's not what I was meaning to say, so sorry if you picked up on that. What I do suggest is that we have timely desires, and understanding the desires of our customers, and messaging to those desires is something we've been doing for a thousand years, I can make the case. So I guess it's an understanding of what constitutes manipulation, and I think there's a theoretical discussion, or a philosophical discussion. I would suggest that if I knew that my customers tend to not look at advertising from eight to nine, and if I use that to my advantage, is that manipulation? I don't know, I wouldn't suggest it was. Or, if I do natural segmentation to understand how to create a product that meets kind of an attitudinal or a belief system, is that manipulation? I don't think so, I think I'm in marketing insights, my job is to do just that. Or A/B testing – if I do A/B testing knowing and taking a look at – we do website design, I do an A/B testing to figure out whether this call to action works better than that call to action, and knowing that, does that constitute manipulation? I don't think it does, but I think that's also a philosophical problem, or an issue that every brand needs to consider, and know which kind of line do they want to fall? So anyways, I guess everybody has to make that call for themselves. Behavioral psychology, behavioral sciences helps us understand the desires that people want. Now how you use that information is up to you. Mindstates does not, I don't believe – I'm messaging to a mindstate, does not manipulate, it just makes better marketing.

Melanie Courtright: Michelle, throwing you on the spot a little bit, can you talk about how Mars thinks about advertising messaging and psychology?

Michelle Gansle: Yeah, definitely. I think our number one rule is be authentic, don't manipulate, and be on purpose. So we have made decisions to cut any advertising or media that's not those three things. In a lot of places, especially like in China, where they're ahead of the curve, we've shifted media to be about supporting messages around health and safety, and not even advertising our brands or products. So I guess we take it very seriously, and we think that messaging that's relevant for the moment and is authentic to the brand is helpful and supportive, message that feels tone deaf or ignoring the current situation is not appropriate or helpful.

Melanie Courtright: Or even feels like it's trying to exploit. I know we've all watched some television advertisements, that some of them feel that authentic, and you can connect with them. Others feel a bit exploitative – is that a real word? Like they're trying to exploit it for whatever, they're trying to use this for their own benefit, rather than for the benefit of society. It kind of goes back to Jackie's statement – as a whole, we seem to be wanting to more think about society than a specific sales event. So it all comes together, that's great. Anyone else want to add anything on that topic, before I move on?

Jackie Lorch: I would just add a little on what we were talking about, being authentic. Really, even more important to step outside our own experience, because the comment was made earlier that we're not all experiencing it the same way, socioeconomic groups very different. We know that furniture stores and office supply stores are really busy right now with helping people set up their home office, but all those glossy pictures of the perfect office, and you're sitting in a tiny little city apartment on the edge of your bed with your laptop, it's just not being tone deaf to those kinds of differences.

Melanie Courtright: Yeah, that's great. Chris, I know you already answered this question, but some people are wondering how they can get their hands on the Ipsos data. It's available in the chat box. It's also available on the Insights Association page, but Chris, do you want to say anything else about that?

Chris Jackson: Yeah, it's just, all of the research I showed is public research, it's freely available. If anyone has any questions about it, I certainly encourage you to reach out, we're happy to talk and share public data. I did enter the URLs into the Q&A box, because they're somewhat long, and probably difficult to remember, so get it there, and again, if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to reach out to me, chris.jackson@ipsos.com.

Melanie Courtright: Well, a quick round table for everyone, but to close out the session, the one key thing that you're seeing, the one thing, the key takeaway that you would want, and for Michelle, the key takeaway you'd want your partners to have, probably, as they think about consumers – the key takeaway that you would have for people as they think about how to honestly and authentically connect with consumers during this time, based on the things that you're seeing changing around you. What would that be? Maybe, if Ujwal's ready, we'll start with Ujwal?

Ujwal Arkalgud: Sure. I don't know if I have advice on how to connect with their consumers, it's not really my expertise, but as an anthropologist, the only thing I will say is that there is less change on the other end than we are all predicting. That's the only thing I will say. The world is not going to suddenly look blue when now it looks gray, it's not going to be that significant. It might go from a shade of gray to another shade of gray, and I think that's the biggest piece of takeaway I will say, just looking at all the data, and trying to understand the massive cultural shifts that are happening.

Melanie Courtright: That's been one of my points too though, in research continuity – as you guys know, we put out a piece on research continuity – the biggest benefit of research continuity right now is to be able to see the peaks and the ebbs, and know when it settles back into the new normal. It will shift, but it won't stay where it is today, and we need research to give us data signals for when it starts to level back out, so I love some of Chris Jackson's answers watching it, and Dynata's too, as they're watching it move and settle in. I know we're all doing that. Jackie?

Jackie Lorch: Yes, after what you just said, I think the biggest thing is, don't be so afraid of saying the wrong thing that you are afraid to stay in touch with your customers. We have to stay in touch during this time. It may be a different type of touchpoint, as Mars is doing, but we can't have a black hole that we just stayed away from our customers and didn't communicate with them during this time, and now in the time that we recover and we need to reset, we don't know where we are, we're kind of lost. So stay in touch.

Melanie Courtright: Will?

Will Leach: Yep, I would echo something I said before. You, as brands, have created a timeless, hopefully, truth for your customer, that's your job. I think now is, use a timely expression, given all this uncanny kind of uncertainty in the world, use a relevant, timely expression of bringing your brand truth to life, and if you do that, I think you're going to come out of this in a much better place, frankly, than you were even a couple months ago.

Melanie Courtright: Thank you. Chris, and then Michelle?

Chris Jackson: I think the thing to take away from this is, there is not going to be a return to normal in the world we knew from 2019. We can't say exactly where things are going to land, but things are going to be different. 9/11 brought about the whole sort of security apparatus that the United States sort of enjoyed for the next 20 years. The great recession reorganized the economy. This looks to have an impact, at least on par, if not greater, with both of those, just from the early data we're seeing from our public opinion surveys. So anyone who's involved in research who wants to be doing good work for your clients’ needs to sort of encourage them to stay in touch with the public right now, because we do not know where people are going to land, but it is not going to look like what it looked like on January 1^st of this year.

Melanie Courtright: That's great, thank you. And Michelle?

Michelle Gansle: I think both taking what Ujwal and Chris said and mashing it together – things, they will not be going back to old normal, there will be a new normal, but agree 100 percent that it will be shades of gray. So a third of people shop online – at some point in time, maybe that will change to 50 percent, or 45 percent. So yes, there will be more people shopping online, but it's not going to be all of a sudden 100 percent of people shopping online, there will be some bounce back to old reality, so I think that we have to keep that in mind. I will say, not a predictive, but from all of the things that I've read, almost every piece of work triangulates to that best case, markets and economies should be getting back to normal end of Q3, Q4, and worst case somewhere into 2021. So while that might sound like a really far way away, I think it's also helpful to see indicators like Chris' that consumer confidence is starting to flat, transmission rates are starting to go down, so there are some slight indicators of hope that things are starting to move towards new normal for most markets. So I think we need to start shifting from what's happening right now to how are we going to handle being in the new normal world?

Melanie Courtright: That's great, thank you. Thank you all very much. I have one question here about the CARES Act. I just want to let you all know that with the content that we had today being so full and round, we ran out of time, but also, the questions that everyone had about the CARES Act were really specific and detailed, and so we want to give Howard and a couple people he's going to bring to the conversation more time in a focus session on the CARES Act. That will be next week. We might even end up doing two sessions next week that are something specific to the CARES Act, but we will be following up. If you're a member, there's also a lot of new information that Howard posted even last night on the Engage, and we're posting some more on the resource page. So if you've got a burning question, and you really need an answer to it today or Monday, feel free to either hit Engage, send me an email, or go to the resource page. Also again, we've had to cancel our conference for next [AUDIO SKIPS] but it is online now. We're getting some really good interest in this, and we would really appreciate everyone's support of this conference, it's a big, important event for the Insights Association. And just a reminder, we're going to keep doing these, we've got a lot more content coming, all focused on the things that you're asking us to tell you, to support you with. Your ideas are welcome, and if you need anything, I really hope you'll reach out. Thank you very much, Ujwal, Jackie, Will, Michelle, Chris. Your emails are there for people to reach out to you too, and I appreciate what you're doing to give back, and I hope you all have a safe and happy weekend, and let us know if you need anything.

Jackie Lorch: Thank you.

Michelle Gansle: Thank you.

Chris Jackson: Thank you, be well.

Melanie Courtright: Be well.