Veylinx Blog

How is the Pandemic Affecting Demand for Personal Care Products?

Written by Anouar El Haji | May 26, 2020 7:21:00 AM

As the COVID-19 pandemic continues to cause immense changes in many domains, Veylinx wanted to shed some light on how the crisis affects consumer purchase behavior in different markets and industries.

The team at Veylinx conducted a behavioral study to investigate the demand for essential personal care products amid the COVID-19 pandemic in four key markets — the US, the UK, Italy, and China. The research was conducted using Veylinx’s behavioral insights platform, which includes consumers participating in real auctions to measure their actual purchase interest.

The study's objectives were: 

  • To measure claimed and actual demand for personal care products during the pandemic
  • To measure the gap between claimed and actual purchase interest in the four key markets

As we often explain to our customers, there is a difference between what consumers claim they’re going to buy and what they actually buy. We find that the real purchase interest of Chinese consumers most closely matched their claimed purchase interest. Only a slight mismatch was found among British consumers, while we found a large discrepancy among Italians.

Table 1. %WTP > RRP: Percentage of consumers actually willing to pay at least the recommended retail price.

Purchase interest for essential personal care products does not seem to depend on virus stage, lockdown severity, or country (Figure 2).

 Figure 2
 
In the figure below we’ve visualized which groups of consumers are most accurate about their actual purchase behavior. They tend to be between 25 and 45 years old, have higher income levels and live in large cities. They’re also more likely to purchase essential personal care products more than twice a week, extremely concerned about the pandemic, and experience health conditions such as asthma, diabetes, cardiovascular or renal diseases.
 
Figure 3

 

These high-level findings show that the gap between claimed and actual purchase interest persists across countries.
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