For Creatives, Strategists & Marketers

Somewhere around the middle of last year when the cost-of-living crisis was beginning to bite, M&C Saatchi London’s chief strategy officer, Sophie Lewis, decided she needed to know more.?

Consultancies and agencies were publishing reports on the effects of inflation faster than most people could read them, but they typically only provided snapshots of attitudes and behaviours, and they dated quickly. Lewis wanted to create something that was more enduring and more alive.?

So this February, she and a senior strategist at the agency, Shaun Okoh, began a month-long focus group with a representative sample of 50 UK consumers that took place entirely on WhatsApp.?

Every weekday morning, Lewis and Okoh would send participants questions about their spending habits, and the participants would send their responses by the evening.?

The idea was to create a moving picture of how people were feeling about and responding to inflation, and also to allow the agency to ask new kinds of questions as the economic situation changed.?

What did M&C Saatchi learn? For starters, that people will tell you almost anything when you ask through WhatsApp. The participants had no qualms sharing details about their sex lives, for instance, or the fact that they were taking drugs on nights out instead of drinking because it was cheaper.?

More practically, Lewis also learned that ‘nothing anymore is just about the thing’. People want almost everything they do to provide them with multiple benefits. Gyms are no longer just for exercise, for example, they’re also for socialising. And brands should think hard about what they can offer their customers beyond the obvious, says Lewis.?

Lewis’ conclusion from the month-long study is that in times of economic turmoil, ‘no brand is an island’.??

‘Partnership, for a vast majority of brands, is possibly the only way out of some of their situations,’ she says. ‘Finding ways that brands can coexist and help each other in the current context, I think will probably be the way that brands who are in troubled categories can really thrive.’?

Read our full interview with Lewis,?here.

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Photo by Dima Solomin on Unsplash

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