Try as I might, it’s pretty hard to come up with interesting content for all of you that isn’t somehow Trump-related. The President is casting a huge – and possibly unprecedented – shadow over not only the political landscape, but brands, media, and the markets as well. You might be getting tired of hearing about it. So, I’ll do my best to lighten things up.
Here are a few of the things we saw this week:
The clear majority of people still prefer traditional office space where they work – or at least they think they do. With the rapid emergence of co-working space and open floor plans, two-thirds of U.S. Adults still prefer traditional space, with closed offices, cubicles, and conference rooms. Notably, even Millennials choose traditional over non-traditional space, 48% to 28%. HOWEVER, look what happened when we crossed our office space question with our standard job-happiness question:
have a wide-open floor plan at CivicScience – and as I’ve said before – I love my job.
We did an extremely important study on which QSR or Fast Casual brand has the best French fries. Hold on to your hats. The answer was McDonald’s, by a mile, followed by Five Guys and Chick-fil-A. These rankings were virtually identical to the same question we asked a year ago. That’s the kind of deep, life-altering insight you can expect here, folks.
OK. I held off as long as I could.
Trump’s interaction with brands is definitely having an impact – it’s just not consistent. Last week, I promised you some insight into consumers’ reaction to Nordstrom and Under Armour, in the wake of their respective Trump-related news. We’re still not ready to share complete findings because the numbers are, well, complicated. But here’s my initial take: For both brands, the biggest changes are happening among consumers who previously had no strong opinion about them. And those people are split almost equally in both directions, along party lines.
This means that for a mainstream brand like UnderArmour, the good news and bad news balance each other out. Current brand consumers don’t seem to be affected one way or the other.
Nordstrom, however, might see some net negative impact among its existing customer base. I admit that I didn’t expect this. I was reminded that a surprising number of upper-middle-class white women voted for Donald Trump in November. Guess who shops at Nordstrom. Yep. Now, whether these pro-Trump consumers protest with their wallets remains to be seen.
Stay tuned and…
Enjoy life,
JD
