It’s depressingly easy to politicize a pandemic occurring in an election year. There are, however, many other ways to understand people than by their political alignment. It can be refreshing to look at the other things that divide us. While many brands have gone partisan to woo consumers, here are some parts of the economy that advertise on a different basis.
Demographic-Specific Brands
Some companies attract customers not necessarily by choice but simply because of what they sell. Among these are companies who sell environmentally friendly products or whose customers are predominantly women.
Out of more than 8,000 respondents, 41% of those who reported that environmental friendliness was a priority in their purchasing habits said they would remain in quarantine. Only 14% said they would return to all or most of their daily activities. Those who said environmental friendliness was not a priority showed no significant preference.
For brands that tout their products as environmentally friendly, this might be a problem–then again, cleaning products are in high-demand.
With a wider market footprint, the gender divide is also clear in the response to a hypothetical return-to-normal notice. Men are more inclined than women to return to at least some activities. Women are skewed toward remaining in quarantine, leaving a 14 percentage point difference between men and women on this issue.
For whatever reasons this is the case, it would probably mean a lag between men’s and women’s focused brands without a good online presence.
Wireless Providers Indicate Employee Comfort
On the employment side of the economy, there has been widespread concern about when and how workers will be called back. Several states and municipalities have already issued guidelines suggesting different ways to enforce either returning to work or remaining at home. With concern rising, it’s important to know how the workers themselves are feeling–and while they are of course divided it seems that their choice of wireless carrier is somewhat predictive of their comfort with returning to work
Of particular note are the gaps between the major and budget carriers. Users of MetroPCS, Boost, or Cricket are clearly the most cautious about returning to work. The differences between the major carriers are also worth noting, particularly Sprint, whose users seem to be most staggered in their response, and Verizon, the only carrier to have more than half of its customers ready to return to work within a month.
Silent Summer
Finally, it’s clear that tourism based businesses are going to suffer this summer. CivicScience asked more than 25,000 people how soon they would be comfortable going on vacation and the hesitance is clear. Forty-three percent of respondents said they would not feel comfortable traveling for at least six months–at time of writing, that means around Thanksgiving at the earliest.
The rest of the respondents were split close to even, indicating that when travel does resume it will–as is the case with so many facets of this pandemic–recover in stages.
