Your category may be bigger than your product - as opera, of all things, can teach us. Only 28% of those interested in opera actually listen to opera music, reminding us that for any category, there’s substantial opportunity in adjacent areas - whether or not they involve velvet curtains and elaborate costumes.
Scroll down to read about going rogue, the WNBA, and East German price controls.
Stats to power your week
🏴☠️Are you getting nervous yet? It seems like all the big AI companies have struggled recently with their models going rogue. 30% of consumers are worried about this, but it’s not the biggest worry consumers have with AI, which is misinformation. People are more worried about AI being misused as a tool by other people than what AI can do under its own steam. GWI Pulse
📝38% use AI tools for advice on making personal decisions, putting it higher than category levels like productivity or physical health. Chatbots aren’t just used for retrieving information, but actually telling people what to do. GWI Pulse
🎓The Jason Arday scandal has given fresh ammunition to critics who argue that a focus on diversity can come at the expense of other priorities. But the public is fairer on DEI than you might think: 37% think DEI policies are a success, compared to 26% who don’t. The difficult question is whether success in that area can compromise success elsewhere. GWI Pulse
🍴There’s no such thing as a free lunch, but no-one told consumers that. In a recent survey on price controls (more on this later), only 21% indicated price controls would lead to shortages, even though they’re one of the textbook predicted consequences when prices are capped below the point where supply meets demand. GWI Pulse
Meet the audience: WNBA viewers
Without GWI data
With GWI data
This week’s audience is a great example of how cultural stereotypes and AI’s obsession with semantics can lead to misleading outcomes. There’s a simple chain of thought that says women’s sport is played by women, so it must be mostly supported by women as well.
When we add audience data we can go beyond the most visible stereotypes to find an audience that’s broader, more male, more family-based and more demographically conventional than the stereotype implies. It’s also a reminder of how much the WNBA and NBA audiences overlap - something that’s particularly salient at the moment as former NBA players protest the WNBA’s gender identification policies by declaring themselves available for the latter league’s draft.
Chart of the week
Whether it’s in New York or the original York, the cost of living remains top of the political agenda, and more politicians are looking at price controls as a potential source of relief.
Textbook economic theory would tell you price controls don’t take away the pain, they just place it elsewhere - whether that’s other fees or shortages. But consumers aren’t just keen on saving money (as you might expect), they also think price controls are actually feasible. A really striking insight: consumers in areas that correspond with the old East Germany, which enforced price controls, are more likely to see their benefits than West Germans - despite their negative impact at the time.
It may be because consumers are unaware of the tradeoffs, or that they are and they’d still prefer price controls anyway. In either case, consumers may be surprised when those tradeoffs become visible.
More from GWI
Organizations are going AI first, and the appetite for data has never been bigger. As the requests pile up, our team has explored how insights teams can combine self-serve insights with adequate guardrails.
Almost everyone is a gamer in some way (even if it’s just a daily Wordle), but brands still keep getting gamers wrong - as Nick Rovano, head of advertising at Discord, discussed with us recently.
