December 14, 2018 
3 min read
Five hundred twenty-five thousand six hundred minutes make up a year. But, as they asked in the song, how do we go about measuring them? Whilst daylights, sunsets, midnights and cups of coffee are all wonderful tools of calculation, over at Attest, we’ve come up with another way to note the changes we’ve seen over the last twelve months: stats.
This year, we’ve asked UK consumers over 368,000 questions, and they’ve zapped their opinions, thoughts, likes and dislikes right back at us in record speed. Our imaginary mountains of data are sky high, and we’ve rooted through them to for our favourite stats of 2018. In the year that ‘single-use’ was the most representative word; Meghan Markle was the most googled person; and ‘World Cup’ the most googled term, Attest’s stats shed light on the trends we’ve been seeing, and how they’ve been affecting popular opinion.
In 2018…
We wanted to save our oceans
49% of people would like to give up using plastic tomorrow
Veganism was a tastier prospect than ever
65% of people say they like eating vegan meals
We got savvier about bad data
14% of people have lost trust in a brand this year because of personal data breaches
Cash was no longer king
Just 19% of Londoners like using cash
We had concerns about big business
42% of people thought that the government handled the collapse of Carillion badly
We went off bad apples
Apple was the brand most people fell out of love with this year
We caught football fever, big time
76% of people were excited about 2018’s summer of football
We got cross about trains
After a year of strikes and delays, only 13% of people thought that the government would do a worse job of running trains than the current operators
We felt defensive of our NHS
74% of people would highly recommend the NHS
Dads loved ads
79% of dads said they’d love to get gifts they’ve recently seen advertised
Pester power stayed as strong as ever
71% of parents were pestered by their children to buy them presents they’d seen adverts for
We were proud as punch
51% of people were more likely to buy from a brand who actively supported the Pride movement
When you try to think back about all the headlines that made the news this year, it can be difficult to make head or tail of everything that went on. This wide world we live in is busy with noise, and loud with confusion. Collective conversations linked and diverged, and our opinions shifted or hardened as we watched 2018 play out.
For brands, these turning points in the news and in people’s points of view were subtly (and less subtly) morphing the climate they operate in. Everybody knows that when it comes to business nothing can operate successfully in a bubble. And while pulling your head out of the sand to look at the world around you is a good start, bear in mind as 2019 looms that many opinions will be unreachable without directly asking people for them.
If you’d like to speak to consumers as the change is happening, get in touch with us to be in the know in 2019. You can stay abreast of the tiny ripples of moving opinion to best decide how to ride the greater wave of the collective narrative we’re all building all the time.
