As the Drake/Kendrick Lamar beef rolls on, their home cities of Toronto and Los Angeles are being drawn into the fray. LA has the bigger share of hip-hop fans, but both locations have more than the global average. The top location in the world? The hotbed of modern rap, Fulton County (aka Atlanta).
Scroll down to read about tablets, tapioca, and Tesla’s travails.
Stats to power your week
🪫The EV market is cooling off, but why? One of the big reasons is how much electric cars are depreciating in value, thanks to batteries aging, technology improving, and government incentives that only help the first buyer. In fact, value depreciation is the fastest-growing perceived disadvantage of EVs, with the number saying this up 23% year-on-year. GWI Automotive
🥤 Starbucks’ summer line-up includes their twist on a boba tea, with the brand rolling out pearl-laden beverages to appeal to younger audiences. You’re most likely to find 16-24s sipping on a boba tea, with 17% of them tapping into tapioca goodness. GWI Core Plus
🤏Apple has announced its new iPad Pro, claiming it’s the thinnest product they’ve ever put out. iPad owners are 17% more likely than the average tablet owner to say they want their tech to be sleek, though the most distinctive quality they’re after is for “futuristic” products. GWI Consumer Tech
📈Germany is experiencing a surge in far-right support, and our research gives some clues as to why. Its consumers are unique in saying that immigration is their country’s most important issue at the moment. GWI Zeitgeist
📺 The most common reason TV streamers are canceling subscriptions? They’re paying for too many. To combat this, Disney and Warner Bros have come together to simplify the process, bundling in Disney+, Hulu, and Max. GWI Zeitgeist
What’s on our radar
There are two ways to look at AI chatbots: an uncanny replacement for human interaction, or a useful tool for the lonely. A recent paper finds that using them helps people engage with others again, while a New York Times piece is cautiously optimistic. Although, other recent research highlights the limits of AI empathy.
Large language models also have huge potential in gaming, offering the chance for games to have much more free-form dialogue options. This is a key factor behind publisher Krafton’s push into AI, while Electronic Arts is eyeing up how it could cut game development time.
The carbon impact of raising children is a rising concern for potential parents, with eco-friendly baby products hard to come by. Change might be on the horizon though, as a Japanese company has released the first recycled diapers, while a startup is making sustainable cribs.
TikTok has become the first social network to automatically label AI-generated content (something almost all consumers want), while the UK government has debuted a new safety tool for assessing AI models.
As for AI-generated content in the wild: Nike has developed a model to design products, Absolut is helping to address AI bias in fashion, and research has suggested that using AI-generated imagery helps people support more pedestrian-friendly urban planning.
Research from a credit reporting agency backs something we see hints of in our own data – that Gen Z are less cautious around credit than millennials were at the equivalent age.
Chart of the week
If you think of prohibition, you probably think of 1920s America, bootleggers, and speakeasies (and maybe Springfield’s Beer Baron). But if you look at our data, you don’t have to go back too far to see the impact of banning alcohol.
To relieve pressure on its health service, South Africa imposed three temporary bans on alcohol sales during Covid lockdowns – two in the spring and summer of 2020, and one in early 2021. And our data on beer buying during that time offers some interesting lessons from this quasi-natural experiment. Sales would drop with each ban (though not completely), but every time they’d rebound with pent-up demand, and subsequent bans had diminishing returns.
After all that, beer sales stabilized, and today are pretty much where they were before the pandemic. Even after strong government intervention, demand for beer is pretty resilient.
Local lowdown
Evergreen demand for EVs in China
Up top, we hinted that electric vehicle demand is set to slow this year. In Europe and the USA, year-on-year consideration for new EVs has decreased by 12%. This isn’t too much of a surprise, considering the decline in environmental sentiment we’ve seen recently.
But over in China, demand’s rock steady. Chinese consumers are the most likely market to consider buying an EV – 18% more likely than the global average. Over 1 in 10 professionals drive electric vehicles as their main car, and this number has increased by 28% year-on-year.
But what has changed is where they’ll be shopping. While Tesla planted their flag when vehicles rolled off the production line from the Shanghai Gigafactory in 2019, the brand has struggled in recent years. Since last year, the number of Chinese consumers who’d choose a Tesla for their next car has dropped 34% – more than any other brand.
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