July 2020 is going to be very different to recent years, the COVID-19 pandemic has had a significant impact on the way people go about their lives. July normally brings feelings of excitement and freedom, as schools break up, the weather is warm and we’re all getting ready to go on our summer holiday. The truth is, whilst this will still happen for some, many people will have to radically change their plans.
This is why at Spark Emotions we truly understand how people are feeling on a monthly basis. Throughout the year, we focus in on different topics by month depending on what is really important to the general public. For July, we spoke to 1,000 people to understand their emotions and what plans they have for the month ahead.
The July paper bring you an understanding of what the general mood of the nation is in the United Kingdom, how peoples finances have been impacted by the pandemic, how parents are going to cope with the school holidays and what people are going to be doing for holidays this year.
The pace of change is unprecedented
When we conducted this study at the start of June, the number of external influences on peoples lives was significant, from the Black Lives Matter protests, to the Government dropping plans to send primary school children back in July, to non-essential retail shops opening back up. All of these factors would have played a significant role in how people were feeling when they participated in our study.
Adults feel hopeful yet anxious about the month of July as the UK reopens
UK adults have two very different emotions when we talk to them about how they feel about July. On one hand, their main emotion is hopeful about the month ahead, but they also have a deep feeling of anxiety. This could be due to several factors that are creating very mixed emotions.
UK adults feel more positive than they did at the start of May
Our Spark Emotional Wheel is a bespoke tool that helps us quantify emotions. We have been monitoring how people are feeling on an emotional level whilst we were in a national lockdown. We have found the UK public have moved from feeling Inquisitive in 2019, to Attentive in May and Enthusiastic in June. The ideal score is at the top of the wheel, which has people feeling proud and confident, in 2019 the score was much closer to this. Despite feeling more positive, emotions have not returned to pre COVID-19 levels and feelings of control have decreased as the uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic continues.
What this means for you
It is crucial to understand your customers’ emotions so you are able to tailor your product or service to help alleviate your customers’ anxieties. There are many things as a business you can do and by getting to the truth of how they are feeling and what you can do to help.
For example, within the July Mood of the Nation report, we know people are feeling anxious about the school holidays and childcare, so what can you do as a business to help this. It could be semi-prepared lunches to save time during the working day which allows people to finish work earlier and entertain the kids, or could it be educational games to keep children occupied during the week, which can also help to make up for the missed time at school during the lockdown.
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