Covid-19 Daily Bulletin 21/05: Gym Subscriptions and Pandemic Babies

Covid-19 Daily Bulletin 21/05: Cancelled Subscriptions and Quarantine Babies

There's a long road ahead for gyms.

Here we go again. Today we’re looking at anxiety and depression levels, cancelling subscriptions, and what we’re naming babies under lockdown.

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From topping up our savings to paying for our streaming providers, many of us have regular monthly outgoings. These have obviously been susceptible to Covid-19 disruption, whether that’s because of financial issues or lockdown measures.

Using Brandwatch Qriously, we surveyed 9,075 adults from Australia, China, France, Germany, Italy, Spain, the UK, and the US, through their smartphones and tablets. We wanted to find out how they were approaching cancellations of key services.

Generally the numbers are quite low, which is encouraging. 11% of savers reducing or stopping their contributions is still a significant chunk, but it could be far worse.

Subscription services have seen the same drop of 11%. This tallies with a previous bulletin’s findings, in which we found an uptick in mentions around cancelling services. Again, over a tenth of subscribers can’t be ignored, but it’s certainly not the end of the world.

It won’t surprise many to see gym memberships top the list. With gyms closed in many countries, and people trying to social distance, it’s a no brainer for money savers to cut them from the budget.

It’s clear that this is an incredibly difficult time for the gym industry. And in some places, the picture is particularly bleak.

Nearly a quarter of Spanish respondents said they’d cancelled or reduced their gym memberships, with the UK, Australia, and China reporting similar numbers. That’s an incredible loss of revenue for gym owners.

Even in France and Germany where numbers are lowest (12% and 11% respectively), the hit gyms are taking is sizable.

Gyms and other businesses that are seeing their income rapidly diminish will be looking forward to reopening to try to claw back money and save themselves from bankruptcy. Unfortunately, reopening is just the first step.

In the same Qriously survey, we asked people about how safe they would feel going to certain establishments and events post-lockdown.

There’s a clear trend here. Events or places where you’ll have to be in close proximity to others–concerts and sports events–are seen as less safe, especially compared to beaches where there’s space to spread out and no defined seating.

Obviously things can be done at venues to mitigate safety issues, but that won’t make people’s concerns vanish. Gym owners need to think about where they sit amongst the above.

Clearly, convincing consumers they will be safe will be as much a part of marketing as convincing them to come at all. By learning about their customers’ concerns and preferences, businesses can get themselves into a better position when lockdowns end.

Welcome to the world quarantine babies

For a bit of a break from the doom and gloom, we decided to find out what baby names were taking people’s fancy under lockdown. We used our Consumer Research platform to look at social media posts from March 1 – May 20 to see what they were.

Seven of the top ten baby names on the list are very traditional and pretty common. John, Rose, James, David, Jack, Peter, and Joe all appear on the US’s Social Security baby name popularity list.

Although popular, Angel and Grace had fallen out of favor in recent years. According to Consumer Research, both have had mention increases during lockdown on social media. Mentions of Angel on social increased 54% in March and April, up from January and February.

At least 53k social posters predict a baby boom thanks to lockdown, so check in on our @BW_React account in December – we might just cover pandemic baby boom names.

And in other parenting news

In even more wholesome news, you might have spotted the new YouTube channel, ‘Dad, how do I?’ The new channel has seen a meteoric rise into the social distancing spotlight.

Using his experiences and learnings from growing up without his father around, father of two Rob Kenny from Chicago has created one of the fastest growing YouTube channels right now. His aim is to help everyone perform everyday tasks they might have turned to their father for help with so he can pass on his wisdom.

Although his channel only started one month ago, Rob’s racked up 2.5m total views (as of today) on his channel according to BuzzSumo’s YouTube analyzer.

And for 480k people on social media, he’s now a hero in his own right. His videos and channel have collected 40k mentions that call him “the purest person”, and 413k mentions of the crying emoji in the last 30 days, according to our Consumer Research platform.

So if you’ve got an idea, roll with it. You could end up with a flyaway success just like Rob.

Join our Covid-19 roundtable

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Thanks for reading

We’ll see you again tomorrow. If you want to get these bulletins sent to you directly, head here.

Stay safe,

Brandwatch Response Team

Digital Consumer Intelligence

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