Back to basics: What consumers are really craving post-pandemic and why

Let’s face it, this past year has been anything but easy. The COVID-19 pandemic has added complexity to many activities we used to take for granted and acted on through habit, and with this ongoing reality comes a strong desire for simplicity and ease.

As researchers, that got us thinking about how much peoples’ mentalities have changed throughout the pandemic and what that might mean for their habits as consumers. We believe that to understand why audiences act the way they do, we must get upstream of these behaviours to understand the feelings and beliefs shaping them. As attitudes shift amidst the ever-changing COVID-19 climate, it’s critical to keep a pulse on how your audience’s relationship with you is changing as well.

The APEX Scoring System

We fielded our simple 2-question APEX Score survey with North Americans as we hit the pandemic’s one-year mark to see how attitudes have shifted and what audiences expect from major brands now and into the future. The APEX Scoring System is a revolutionary way to quantify audience engagement, by using survey-based data and advanced analytical modelling. The system uses 16 key metrics that indicate a person’s likelihood to advocate for a brand. Through this pulse survey, we’ve uncovered that the strongest relationships audiences are having with brands, regardless of category, are uncomplicated and predictable ones.

It’s not the deep and profound message that most marketers tend to search for when creating experiences, but when we listen to people from across North America, we hear their sentiment echoed in our APEX Attitudes — make this experience as predictable and uncomplicated as possible. Emotive’s Chief Scientist, Nick Hobson, PhD, weighs in on the psychology of complex circumstances and how brands can lean in to make their experiences less complicated.

1. When faced with change and loss our brains search for predictability over complexity. For all its wondrous features and functions, the human brain is one thing above all else: a prediction machine. The brain is always thinking one step ahead. When we experience what our brain has predicted, we get a jolt of dopamine that courses throughout the brain and body. At our core, it feels good to experience predictability.

But, when those experiences are different from what the brain predicted, there’s a cascading of “prediction error signals'' that fire off to alert our system that something is amiss. Granted, there’s a possibility that some of those “errors” are in the positive direction, like when you go to pay full price for a product and the checkout person rings the item through at 50% discount. But to the brain, losses loom larger than gains, and so the “errors” in the negative direction are weighted much more heavily and put us into a state of hypervigilance to protect us against the dangers of loss and failure and other threats.

The last year has been chock-full of losses due to uncertainty, frustration and disappointment. And because of it, our brain, in its obsessive hunt for predictability, doesn’t want to risk any more possible negative outcomes. It’s a primitive response: the brain will direct our behaviour to seek out the things that are the least complicated as a safe bet to minimize the likelihood of something bad happening.

2. When things are in flux, anxiety creeps in and we seek out experiences that are uncomplicated as a way of responding to how we feel. When things are good, we open ourselves up to a multitude of different possibilities. We perceive the world with eyes wide open, and we’re compelled to engage in behaviours that are different and novel. When things are bad, and when there’s a lot of unknown, uncertainty begins to climb.

We are in a state of uncertainty and flux right now. And as soon as it crosses a certain threshold, the brain and body’s very first response is simple and strong: feel anxious. That anxiety triggers our perceptual, sensory and behavioural responses to narrow down all the possibilities of the experience. We think in tunnels, we see with blinders on, and we stick to the behaviours and actions and routine in our lives that we know work for us, that we know we can count on.

In this highly complex state, brands and experiences that are uncomplicated are what we need to respond to the anxiety we all feel. You see, anxiety is a good thing. It’s telling us there’s too much going on right now, so let’s seek out things in the environment that are wonderfully uncomplicated.

3. When we’re faced with uncertainty, humans choose to exploit what they know over exploring what they don’t. Let’s talk about hungry bears. When you starve a bear, or any animal/insect for that matter, it will stick to a single food source, and try to get as much out of it as possible. A satiated and full bear, however, will be much more comfortable with going out and trying to find new food sources. It’s referred to as “Optimal Foraging Theory” and it explains the tendency of a human (or bear or bee) to consider decision trade-offs between exploiting versus exploring.

The exploitation/exploration idea holds true not just in foraging or food contexts. It’s a basic driver and operating mechanism for life and all behaviours. We are constantly, unconsciously thinking about the trade-off of staying or going, of exploiting or exploring. And the scales tend to tip one way or another depending on what’s happening around us.

We know, for example, that when there’s a great deal of uncertainty, we favour exploitation over exploration. Right now, we aren’t so interested in having product or brand experiences that are novel or different. We don’t want to explore. We want to exploit and get what we need. Nothing more, nothing less. The consumer seeking uncomplicated brand experiences is like a starved bear sticking to one berry bush.

What Your Brand Can Do To Take Action

• Focus on simple messaging and predictable service experiences: Ensure your message is clear and easy to connect with so that your audience knows exactly what to expect and can predict their next experience with your brand. Your customers want to know what’s coming next.
• Keep any internal complexity internal: Wherever possible, don’t let organizational challenges around systems, payments, or operations cloud the customer experience. The focus must remain on your audience, not on your organization’s circumstances.
• Deliver on the core elements of your business and reaffirm your offering in a distraction-free way: It is critical to reinforce your core value proposition in a way that highlights the predictable experiences people have come to know and love from your brand, but in a way that feels relevant and speaks to the current social climate.

Written by Nick Hobson, PhD of Emotive Technologies Inc.