Insight Playbooks 2026: Research plays for the changing consumer
Editor's note: This article is an automated speech-to-text transcription, edited lightly for clarity. For the full session, please watch the recording.
According to recent data, store brands are winning out with customers more than common household brands. These brands get better shelf visibility and are typically cheaper, making them more popular with consumers during the current financial upheaval.
In this session from the March 25, 2026, Quirk’s Virtual – The Changing Consumer series, Erica Dinger, head of research and Tom Higgins, senior growth product marketer, from Voxpopme, discuss this issue and the insight playbooks that could be helpful to brands.
Session transcript
Joe Rydholm
Hi everybody, and welcome to our presentation, “Insight Playbook's 2026 Research Plays for the Changing Consumer.”
I'm Quirk's Editor, Joe Rydholm. Before we get started, I just wanted to go over the ways you can participate in today's discussion.
You can use a chat tab to interact with other attendees during today's presentation. And you can use the Q&A tab to submit questions to the presenters, and we'll get to as many as we have time for at the end.
Our session today is presented by Voxpopme. Enjoy the presentation.
Tom Higgins
I will jump straight into it. For those of you that don't know me, I am Tom Higgins. I am the Senior Growth and Product Marketer here at Voxpopme, and I'm joined by the wonderful Erica Dinger.
Erica has spent years in the research industry on both the client side with brands like Under Armour, and also on the vendor side with Voxpopme and Qualtrics. So, she has tons of experience building research programs from the ground up and now works with CPG teams every day. So, she really does understand the challenges that you face day-to-day in your roles.
And I'm really here to just tap into Erica's expertise, and it's a very much a fireside chat format today.
So, I'll be setting the scene and then asking some questions and letting Erica share her knowledge. We would absolutely encourage you to participate, as I said, in the chat and the Q&A as well.
Erica, do you want to say a quick hello?
Erica Dinger
Hello, everyone. That was such a lovely introduction, Tom, and I love that we're calling it a fireside chat. It is already about 80 degrees here, so it is feeling very much like maybe not a fireside chat, maybe a lemonade on the back porch chat.
Tom Higgins
I would absolutely take you upon a lemonade on the back porch, Erica. We've also got some sunshine here in the UK as well, so we're feeling very almost summery or springy, let's call it.
But I'm glad Erica had a power outage last night as well just to throw some drama into the mix, but I'm glad we're all here and thank you for spending the time with us today, Erica.
So, before we get into the playbooks themselves, let's ground today's session in the kind of market reality that we're all seeing out there at the moment.
So, based on a 2025 piece of research from the PLMA, we're now in a situation where one in four brands is a store brand. The competition for shelf space is probably greater than ever, and it's coming primarily from those store brands.
And you're seeing that the impact of that at the till or the checkout, because in 2025, private label brand sales grew at three times the rate of national household brand names.
So, we're seeing this huge shift in both supply and demand, which is having big, big impacts and has big ramifications, both for the brand in which we work for, but also the insights teams and the way we go about conducting our research.
We're seeing, as said, those store brands, they're actually winning both on shelf visibility and on price points. We're seeing them actually take away from that brand share at the shelf, and that's seeing brand loyalty soften across categories.
Today's focus is very much on CPG, but we're seeing this carry across food and beverage. It's having impacts obviously naturally on retailers themselves as well. So yeah, it's really important to recognize that this trend isn't just for CPG brands.
But today we're going to be spending time looking at the CPG playbook, which we’ll come too shortly.
But as a result of that, increased visibility and the softening of brand loyalty, you're seeing shoppers actually trade down. And there's other pressures as well, like economic pressures and there's a cost-of-living crisis, certainly here in the U.K. And I know Erica, it's happening over stateside as well, but you've seen shoppers trade down and at least from their perception without necessarily sacrificing quality.
The scary piece for all of us is that shoppers are beginning to make those switches quietly, and those decisions don't actually show up as signals for our teams until it's too late, either in a brand tracker or in the sales report at the end of the quarter.
Erica, I don't know if you want to add anything to that background.
Erica Dinger
We were talking about this yesterday. There was a French politician in the 19th century who basically said something that was like, "There go my people. I must get in front of them so I can lead them."
It feels like that kind of moment right now for insights teams, “There go my customers. I need to get in front of them so that I can know what they want and make sure they're sticking to my brand.” So, it really feels like a moment of thinking about that.
And I think spoiler alert, the playbooks that we're going to talk about are really a great way to make sure that you are able to get in front of your customers, and you are able to pick up these signals before you're seeing them in your bottom line.
Tom Higgins
Thank you, Erica.
Yeah, such a great point. And carrying it all the way through to that bottom line is what really matters to all of us. That's where we can have the biggest impact. So yeah, excited to delve into this further with you, Erica.
But before we get to that, it's really important to emphasize that these changes, they're not slowly chipping away at brand loyalty. This is a huge shift and we don't have time to study it, plan for it or run a huge piece of research next quarter. This is something that we need to act on today.
Not only because it's a threat, but it's also an opportunity that brand loyalty is very much up for grabs and those brands that can spot those signals earlier are going to win in the marketplace. They're agile insights teams that can find that customer truth and deliver it to the stakeholder when it matters are going to come out on top and their brands are going to come out on top.
So yeah, it's a really important moment for brands operating in the CPG space. And we promised fireside chats.
So, Erica, you work with CPG teams on, like I said at the start, near a daily basis. What's separating the teams and brands that are winning out there versus the ones that are scrambling and are almost feeling on the back foot and being somewhat reactive?