News consumption 2021: Business leaders emerge as the new super consumers

New research suggests that industry bigwigs consume more news media than us regular folk.
October 10, 2021

For many years there has been a pre­sumed wall between B2C and B2B com­mu­ni­ca­tions, PR prac­ti­tion­ers tar­get­ing mass media for con­sumer brands – and with busi­ness deci­sion mak­ers the auto­mat­ic assump­tion is that the media choic­es are trade and business-specific.

This assump­tion is under­stand­able but new ele­phant research con­duct­ed since lock­down has raised ques­tions how far this assump­tion actu­al­ly goes. A new study com­par­ing the media choic­es for con­sumer sam­ples and busi­ness lead­ers sug­gests the busi­ness lead­ers are the biggest dai­ly con­sumers of main­stream nation­al media and are as active as con­sumer audi­ences with mobile chan­nels. The weight­ing between nation­al to trade media sig­nif­i­cant­ly swings in the direc­tion of nation­al media.

As with con­sumers, top­ic choic­es have got a lot more seri­ous over the last year, with Brex­it, Covid-19 issues and eco­nom­ic out­look all fea­tur­ing as top issues to fol­low and react to. The ele­phant research also sug­gests deci­sion mak­ers need to be under­stood as con­sumers and not just by their job. Around 50% of the top­ics they want to read about relate to their fam­i­ly life, inter­ests and hobbies.

One major dif­fer­ence to con­sumers – whilst the UK gen­er­al pub­lic expressed a hunger for more social media threads and news that was pos­i­tive and offered a degree of escapism, the key dri­ver for busi­ness lead­ers was the accu­rate­ly and authen­tic­i­ty of data and trends.

ele­phant will be run­ning some open house Zoom ses­sions on the new research lat­er this month. To reg­is­ter inter­est, con­tact us through the web­site, www​.ele​phant​com​mu​ni​ca​tions​.co​.uk