Podcasts: New ways to listen, and the excellent timing of Brené Brown

Podcasts can make the most mundane of tasks interesting. But now that our lives have been disrupted, what part do they play in keeping people entertained?

Restrictions on travel mean that many of us are working from or sitting at home with a whole bunch of free time on our hands. We’ve looked at how people are spending that time in previous bulletins, but what are people doing while they’re doing these things?

Chatter about listening to podcasts has risen every week since the start of March, indicating renewed interest in tuning in. We found over 60k mentions of the practice last week, up 25% compared to the first week of March.

People are discussing how they are enjoying podcasts while doing a whole range of lockdown activities:

While some people are still talking about listening to podcasts while in transit, cooking was the top activity we found. Exercising and relaxing in the bath were also pretty popular.

Many of these mentions are driven by self care and ‘things to do while in isolation’ content, and Tumblr users appear to be among the biggest advocates.

So, people are listening to podcasts, and podcasts are associated with self care and staying sane during lockdown. What kind of podcast might do well in this environment?

Enter Brené Brown, with her new podcast ‘Unlocking Us.’ It’s the number one podcast in the US at the moment, and we found thousands of people talking about it online.

Brown is known for her feel-good takes on life, and has done the research to back it all up. The release of ‘Unlocking Us’ couldn’t have been better timed, and it’s a good illustration of how life in the shadow of the pandemic is affecting cultural consumption. We’ll be thinking about the ‘soundtrack’ of the pandemic more in future bulletins.

How Covid-19 is affecting our eating habits

From being stuck at home to struggling to get vital supplies, our eating habits have been drastically altered due to the pandemic. From a health perspective, the change in our diets could have a lasting effect

To find out how people’s eating habits have changed, we ran a Qriously survey. We polled 7,115 adults from China, France, Germany, Italy, the UK, and the US via their smartphones and tablets.¹

When looking at food consumption, here’s what we found.

In all countries we surveyed, more respondents said they’d upped their food intake than lowered it (although the difference between lowering and upping food intake in China may not be statistically significant).

Compared to the previous week’s survey, both Italy and the UK saw a big rise in reports of increased food consumption. For Italy, it rose from 36% to 42% of respondents, while in the UK it went from 23% to 33%.

On the other hand, every country still saw a decent amount of people saying they were eating less. If this is because of shortages or lack of access to supplies, this is obviously a huge concern.

We can also see that countries, like Italy and Spain, who are currently seeing some of the worst outbreaks in the world, seem to be eating more.

There is so much at play, so it’s hard to make any firm conclusions as to the exact reasons why. But it’s clear that our food and food-related spending habits are being strongly affected by Covid-19, and that’s unlikely to change any time soon.

Want more of this survey data? Sign up for our weekly Covid-19 insights reports to get just that, along with in-depth analysis.

Connecting at Easter under Covid-19

We are happy to announce that the Easter bunny has officially been classed as an ‘essential worker’. We hope that’ll put all of our readers’ minds to rest.

But many people are worried about how they’ll celebrate, with 45k mentions of social distancing over the last week in relation to Easter. These were overwhelmingly classified as sad, with many saying they’d be unable spend the weekend with their loved ones.

But to make up for that isolation, people have been looking for tech to bring them together. In the last seven days there were 6k mentions of video chatting software relating to Easter.

Despite people feeling alone and upset that they’re unable to visit their families, it wasn’t all doom and gloom. We found 23k Easter-related mentions classified as joyful in our data, showing Covid-19 hasn’t completely dampened our spirits.

Our research shows we’re still optimistic and can find time for the good things in the middle of a pandemic. We’ll just need to turn to technology to help us spend time with the people we love but can’t be with in person.

And it seems like there will still be demand for traditional Easter products, including much loved chocolate eggs, whether we’re just buying them for ourselves or putting them in the mail for friends and family to enjoy.

Keep an eye on the Brandwatch blog this week – we’ve got an upcoming post about how people across APAC are adapting to celebrating various festivities during the pandemic.

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Brandwatch Response Team

¹ Note: All surveys are subject to a wide range of potential sources of error. On the basis of the historical record of the polls at recent general elections, there is a 9 in 10 chance that the true value of a survey result lies within 4 points of the estimates provided by this survey, and a 2 in 3 chance that they lie within 2 points.