New Report: Social Media Now Leads as the Top Purchase Motivator at 43%

DISQO's newly released Consumer Trends Report reveals how consumers are thinking about purchases, advertising, and the world in 2025

Los Angeles, CA - November 12, 2024 — DISQO today released its second annual Consumer Trends report, revealing new insights into consumer attitudes and behaviors for 2025. This year’s report equips marketers with the data they need to keep pace with change, including consumers’ economic outlook, spending plans, media preferences, and advertising perceptions.  

“In 2025, marketers will increasingly seek to align brand with performance by quantifying the incrementality lift of their ad campaigns across channels and throughout the full-funnel,” said Stephen Jepson, President, Media Effectiveness, DISQO. “This year’s report underlines the importance of this connection as people shift their purchase journeys, embracing new capabilities offered across platforms. It’s an important tool for marketers looking to keep and win consumers in 2025.”

Here are some of the key trends from DISQO’s 2025 Consumer Trends Report:

• The power of a brand to drive consumers to purchase
  • Sixty percent (60%) of consumers rank personal experience with a brand as the top factor shaping their brand perception.
  • Gen X and Boomers especially value brand experience, with these groups 12pps and 23pps more likely, respectively, than Gen Z to consider brand experience in their purchases. This points to the lasting impression brands leave during the customer lifecycle.
• Fragmented product discovery journey
  
  • Product research is increasingly conducted across various channels, with 50% of consumers using search engines, 32% relying on retailer websites, and 28% on social media. 
• Social media surpasses TV as a purchase driver
  
  • Social media has overtaken TV as the top purchase driver, with 43% of people citing social media and 41% citing TV as a purchase motivator. 
  • Millennials (+2pps) and Gen X (+3pps) have both increased their responsiveness to social ads over last year while Gen Z remains steady year-over-year, at 62%.
• Growing optimism balanced with economic concerns
  
  • Consumers are cautiously optimistic about the future, with 40% anticipating that 2025 will be better than 2024. 
  • However, inflation (63%) and economic uncertainty (52%) remain prominent concerns, particularly among Gen X and Boomers. 

Download DISQO’s 2025 Consumer Trends report here. 

Report methodology

DISQO surveyed 2,988 US adults (18+) from our first-party, identity-based audience from August 30 to September 12, 2024. The data informing the report was balanced on age, sex, ethnicity, and income and weighted to represent the US population.

More than 2.3 million people have opted in to share their brand experiences with DISQO, empowering clients to cultivate deep insights about their target audiences and to perform objective, single-source measurement of ad effectiveness on attitudes and digital behaviors.

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