Brief leadership on consumer sentiment in your markets after a shock

The task

When something big happens (a war, a tariff announcement, a market crash), a question you need to answer quickly is: Are consumers rattled in the markets we depend on, and is it getting worse? Answering means comparing each market against a clean baseline from before the event, and against a few weeks ago to see the direction of travel.

The AI Connector helps you address this with one prompt. Morning Consult’s Index of Consumer Sentiment runs daily in every tracked market on the same five-question methodology, which means your markets are comparable with each other and reportable weekly. Name the markets you sell in and the event you’re interested in measuring from, and the answer comes back as a view of change: which of your markets moved most since the baseline and which moved most in the past month. For a strategy or finance team, that’s the executive brief, built from the question rather than reconstructed from a pile of exports.

Prompt

Use the Morning Consult connector to show how the weekly Index of Consumer Sentiment has changed in the U.S., Canada and Mexico since the U.S. military strike in Iran on Feb. 28, 2026, compared with where it stood before.

The result

The AI tool pulls the weekly index for the three markets across the year, marks the event on the timeline, takes the four weeks before it as the baseline, and reports where each market stands now against that. The answer, for this event, is that the shock landed unevenly. Sentiment risk from this event is concentrated in the U.S., the other two absorbed the shock within a quarter, and the U.S. decline kept going after the others recovered, which points to something beyond the event weighing on American consumers.

Natural next questions from here:

• “Break the U.S. index into its components. Is it current finances or expectations about the economy that’s still falling?”

• “Add the four European markets we sell in, so I can see whether North America is the exception or the rule.”

• “Overlay our revenue by market so I can see where sentiment risk and exposure overlap.”

Keep in mind

Name your markets. Three markets you sell in make a chart your leadership team can read at a glance; forty-eight make a ranking with more noise than insights. Start with the markets that carry your revenue, and widen the set only when a question calls for it.

Name the event, and let the tool set the baseline. “Since the strike on Feb. 28” gives the tool a date to anchor on; it will take the weeks before as the baseline and the latest full week as now, and tell you both. Naming the event also makes the analysis reproducible when you re-run it in a month.