New Research Reveals Changing Consumer Priorities in 2021

From 2018 to 2020, the same resolutions tended to come out on top each year. Cutting down on drinking led the pack consistently, while giving up meat and career advancement took the second or third spots.

Meanwhile, resolutions around learning and reading never even made the top ten, usually accounting for just 2-3% of the resolutions we included.

But then came 2021.

Seeing family and friends more was never a neglected area for resolutions, but this year it grabbed the top spot, making up 20% of the resolutions in our data. Of course, this was influenced by the pandemic because Covid-19 measures cut us off from our loved ones.

We also found that learning and reading have jumped from outside of the top 10 to the second and third sports. Resolutions around learning something and reading more accounted for 17% and 13% respectively of the conversation we tracked around resolutions.

We can’t definitively say that this was influenced by Covid-19, but with the prospect of being stuck indoors, or having to find a new job, these two resolutions make sense in this context.

On the flip side of the coin, we saw resolutions to give up meat nearly disappear. They only made up 1% of the conversation we tracked, compared to 14% last year. The other big “losers” were saving money (down nine percentage points), and cutting out alcohol (down eight percentage points), although it still took fourth place overall.