Don't Believe Everything You Hear

NielsenIQ launched a product called the Say-Do Gap Measurement Framework. It links what consumers tell researchers to what they actually buy across more than 25 markets. NIQ puts the cost of that disconnect at over 13 billion unit sales in five years.

When a measurement company builds an entire commercial product around the unreliability of your customers, the challenge has surely graduated to PhD-status.

The cleanest illustration we have seen comes from Pew. Asked about social media,

48% of American teens said it has a mostly negative effect on people their age, up from 32% in 2022.

Ask those same teenagers about themselves and the number collapses to 14 percent. Pew went back in April of this year and asked platform by platform.

11% of teen Instagram users said the app had hurt their mental health. 9% said the same of TikTok and Snapchat.

Let’s read that spread again. Roughly half of them believe something is damaging their generation. One in seven thinks it is damaging them. The harm is real, widely acknowledged, and always happening to somebody else.

Our industry's instinct at this point is to say "hypocrisy” and feel clever. We would like to talk you out of that, because it produces terrible briefs.

Calling your audience hypocrites is a way of not doing the work of understanding them, and it leads directly to campaigns built for a customer who exists only in a survey response.

Because the gap runs in both directions, and the second direction is the one not enough people talk about.

Research from NYU Stern's Center for Sustainable Business, in collaboration with Circana, found that sustainability-marketed consumer packaged goods have accounted for nearly 45% of US CPG growth over the past 13 years, growing 4.9 times faster than conventional products and doing so at an average price premium of 27%.

85% of US consumers say they are more likely to buy from a brand that operates sustainably. So people are paying, at scale, at a markup, for years.

Now the twist. GlobeScan's tracking, cited by the NYU team, found that only 31% of consumers recalled hearing much of anything from brands about sustainability last year, down from 50% in 2022. The category is growing nearly five times faster than everything around it, and the brands within it have stopped explaining why.

So one gap is consumers saying more than they do. The other is companies doing less than their own sales data supports.

We spend an enormous amount of energy diagnosing the first and almost none on the second, mostly because the first flatters us and the second implicates us.

The money helps explain the rest. Dentsu's UK Consumer Navigator research found that, following the Budget, 48% of Gen Z said they were more likely to switch brands because of cost or value. Only 38% expected no change in their behavior, the lowest score of any generation.

Values did not lose to cynicism. They lost to arithmetic, in a cohort with less arithmetic to work with than the people writing briefs about them.

Which gives us something practical. A stated value that a person cannot afford to act on is not a lie, it is a wish with a price tag attached.

The useful question in a strategy session is not whether the audience means what they say. It is what acting on that belief would cost them, in money, in time, in social risk, in the effort of switching, and then whether any of that cost is ours to remove.

Most say-do gaps turn out to be pricing and friction problems wearing a morality costume.

Which brings us back to Instagram. Nobody left. Not because the complaints were fake, but because leaving would cost you your friends, your audience, ten years of your own photographic memory, and the ability to know what happened this weekend.

Complaining costs nothing. Leaving costs everything.

The behavior is perfectly rational, and any brand that mistook the complaining for intent to leave has been waiting five years for an exodus that was never coming.

A good place to throw in the recent landmark case of Meta agreeing to pay a massive $17 billion settlement based on the accusation of designing Facebook and Instagram to addict young people. But let's stay on course here.

We should probably admit that we have our own version of this. Studios say craft and ship what fits the timeline. We say we want to invest in young talent, and then open no junior roles (mostly the big guys, not us). We tell clients that distinctiveness is everything, then present the third safe option because it will get approved. The gap between what creative businesses profess and what they procure is at least as wide as anything a consumer panel would show you, and unlike the consumers, we cannot claim we could not afford the alternative.

Watch what people do. Then design for what it costs them.

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