📈 January: 2023 kicked off with some countries experiencing their highest levels of inflation for quite some time, and many experienced significant increases in their energy bills. In the first month of the year a quarter of consumers worldwide felt inflation had had a dramatic impact on them.
🤖 February: A couple of months after it launched, we conducted one of the first studies into the ChatGPT user base. At this time, 65% of the global online population had heard of it. By September, this would increase to 87%.
🎤 March: In May, Loreen would become just the second act to win the Eurovision Song Contest more than once. Sweden was 7th favorite to win in a survey we ran before the competition, but props are due to the farsighted readers of the Times newspaper, as 11% of them correctly predicted the winner.
🏦 April: After the failure of three banks, we asked Americans how they felt about their country’s banking system. Three-quarters still felt central banks were stable, but only 22% could say the same about crypto-friendly banks.
🎛️ May: Hip-hop celebrated its half-century in 2023, marking 50 years since DJ Kool Herc hosted the famous party at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue. In a survey we ran ahead of the official milestone in August, 48% felt that hip-hop unites people, though for consumers who watch MTV every day, it rose to 83%.
⚽ June: The US approved chicken made from animal cells, ie “lab-grown meat”, to be put on sale for the first time. This would come as welcome news to the 11% in the country (and the 30% of CNET readers) excited about the technology.
💅 July: Summer gave us the undoubted pop culture event of the year: Barbenheimer. Profiling the audiences most likely to watch either film produced some gems: Oppenheimer viewers were big players of Civilization (building words as well as destroying them), while wearing highlighter was one of the biggest predictors of watching Barbie.
💉 August: Weight-loss injections like Ozempic and Wegovy started to appear in more headlines throughout 2023, but consumers were pretty split about them. Only 31% were supportive of healthcare providers introducing the jabs, compared to 35% who were unsupportive.
☀️ September: We learned that 2023 was the hottest summer ever recorded, and many countries experienced record-breaking heatwaves. 39% globally were at least somewhat impacted by them, rising to 56% in Japan.
📦 October: One of the trending apps of 2023 was Temu, the Chinese shopping platform, which by October had been used by 23% in the US. Discount stores should take note of their new competition – some of the biggest users of it are customers of chains like Costco, Dollar General, and Family Dollar.
🏪 November: 2023 was the year that Dame Sharon White, the boss of John Lewis, described shoplifting as “an epidemic”. And worldwide, 22% of consumers were very or extremely concerned about shoplifting in their regular stores during the busiest time of the retail calendar.
😵💫 December: “Hallucinate”, “authentic”, and “AI” were all chosen as words of 2023 by various dictionaries, so it feels appropriate to round off our retrospective with a stat that illustrates some of the oddness of last year: in December, 9% felt it was acceptable to use AI to write a wedding speech.
