Life Consumer Insights

Trend - CPG brands and restaurants are launching foods made with chai ingredients. Chai is popular in drinks for its strong, spicy, floral flavor, and its health benefits. This is now being made available to non-tea-drinkers in the form of snacks, breakfast bars, bakery items, and packaged goods.

Insight - The modern consumer in North America has countless flavors from international locations available to them for snacks, drinks, and foods. These consumers are willing to try new flavors, pairings, or interpretations of recipes, to find a new flavor, with priority given to functional foods. Some of the most popular flavors for drinks, such as chai tea or blue curacao in alcohol, are often only found in beverages, making it difficult for certain customers to ever try these flavors.

Trend - Brands are creating towels woven with a waffle-like pattern. These towels dry faster, are more absorbent, and are naturally antibiotic when compared to traditional towels. Towels styled like this are also less prone to mold or unwanted scents due to the aerated design.

Insight - With rising water and energy costs in many regions, consumers are becoming more conscious of how often each textile must be cleaned to remain sanitary. These consumers are drawn to products that stay fresher for longer, effectively saving time and money on cleaning. One such area of concern is the bathroom, where people often leave the same towel for hand-drying for long periods. These consumers are investing in waffle-woven towels for their antibacterial and fast-drying traits.

Trend - Corporations are launching DEI programs and initiatives designed to support the careers and lives of neurodiverse employees. These programs ensure equality in hiring patterns, resource access, and worker compensation. These benefit businesses by improving employee satisfaction and retention.

Insight - In the post-pandemic working world, employees have many options for workplace culture, such as finding flexible working hours, locations, or compensation. Employees each have preferences, such as wanting more flexibility or a larger wage. However, workers quickly leave jobs where they feel they do not belong, resulting in high turnover for less desirable workplaces. Companies are avoiding this fault by launching new DEI initiatives that, in addition to other protected classes, support neurodivergent workers.

Trend - Brands in the artificial intelligence space are launching journaling apps backed by generative AI. These services can help journalers identify patterns in their lives while receiving advice from AI. The AI provides insight into emotional states that otherwise may not have been identified.

Insight - The recent influx of generative AI-powered apps and services has led to many customers seeking out AI-powered apps over regular alternatives. AI typically offers value-adds to applications that would otherwise be very difficult to implement at scale. These customers desire AI for its speed, flexibility, customizability, and personalization, as well as its ability to sort through large amounts of data in an instant. Many such customers desire a personalized AI chatbot for more emotional questions, rather than a massive large language model with a factual focus.

Trend - Brands are launching apps that assist men with managing sexual wellness problems. These apps offer users privacy and security and offer professional support, including recommended products or lifestyle changes. These apps help men maintain sexual health while being discrete.

Insight - One of the largest barriers that prevents men from seeking help for sexual wellness problems is pride. Many men do not want to acknowledge these issues for fear of feeling lesser. As a result, these men either attempt to find their own solutions through OTC products, or seek help online anonymously. These men desire professional-level help that is unintrusive to their lifestyle and does not require associating their identity to their challenges, leading to privacy-focused support apps.

Trend - Brands are tapping into nostalgic soda flavors, reimagining these drinks as health-positive products filled with probiotics. These items satisfy nostalgic desires for hearty, classic sodas while simultaneously boosting consumers' gut health.

Insight - Many consumers remember the joy of drinking soda as a youth. However, far fewer customers continue to drink soda in adulthood for health reasons. These consumers desire to recapture these flavorful, youthful experiences, but not to the detriment of their own health. Therefore these customers place pressure on brands to create better-for-you products that appease nostalgia.

Trend - E-bikes are inherently less sustainable than traditional bikes as they include motors and batteries. Brands are responding to this with bikes made out of vegan and sustainable materials, effectively surmounting these concerns for those interested in purchasing e-bikes.

Insight - Sustainability and animal cruelty are prevalent concerns in the e-bike market, as premium bikes are often adorned with animal leather seats, handlebars, and accents. Traditional bikes are the first choice for vegan customers looking for travel that suits their lifestyles. While e-bikes offer countless features that traditional bikes do not, these e-bikes need to incorporate materials that suit eco-friendly and vegan lifestyles in order to access this broader market.

Trend - Sports brands are entering the metaverse with web3 experiences such as virtual reality (VR) worlds, collectible NFTs, and online events. These services deepen community involvement in sports, providing a convenient and accessible way for fans to connect with athletes and each other.

Insight - Sports fans are a very community-involved group, frequently connecting with fellow fans through fantasy leagues, watch parties, and discussions. This group wants to take its involvement in sports even further and is willing to try new services and experiences to achieve this goal. The popularity of the metaverse provides a means of filling this desire, as it offers convenient community-building, as well as exclusive perks and collectibles that further immerse fans in sports.

Trend - Companies are adding artificial intelligence (AI)-backed features to traditional pillows. These pillows automatically track sleep patterns, as well as head position and temperature, then adjust themselves automatically for comfort. This improves the quality of sleep and reduces snoring.

Insight - Consumers today face countless external stressors related to inflation, the run-off effects of the pandemic, and more. One of the most common ways that stress manifests itself is insomnia. These customers seek out products that improve sleep quality, such as white noise machines and blackout curtains. However, with the recent increase in AI popularity, brands are looking to improve traditional sleep products with AI sensing and automatically-calibrated comfort.

Trend - Brands in the food and beverage industry are launching energy drinks made with organic recipes. These energy drinks take what are typically considered unhealthy products and redefine them as healthy alternatives. These drinks provide natural caffeine supplements to health-focused consumers.

Insight - As more consumers place a focus on health and continue to influence those around them, the wellness industry has found room to grow into more everyday food and beverage products. These consumers are drawn to drinks with zero-sugar, organic, and plant-based labels, while they stay away from processed, unhealthy products. This has created a space in the market for new brands and products to emerge that diversify the market, offering natural, healthy versions of commonly unhealthy foods.