Understand where your customers fit into the economic conditions

The task

A soft quarter needs an explanation. Demand could be down because your brand is losing to competitors. Or, it could be because consumers are pulling back everywhere. But simply saying “We think it’s macroeconomic conditions” probably isn’t going to satisfy anyone.

The AI Connector lets you build the evidence in one conversation, in the three steps a good diagnostic follows: how consumers are feeling overall and in the segment that matters to you, whether that’s showing up in your category, and whether your brand is doing better or worse than the category. Morning Consult tracks all three on the same daily instrument, so they line up by month without reconciliation.

Prompt

Using Morning Consult data, compare the Index of Consumer Sentiment among $100k+ households with all adults over the past 18 months and consumers who say they are customers of Chipotle.

The result

With this prompt, you get back Morning Consult’s Index of Consumer Sentiment for the three audiences on one timeline: all adults, households earning $100,000 or more, and adults who say they’re Chipotle customers, defined by any reported purchase frequency. Over the 18 months, sentiment fell for everyone, and the lines show where the brand’s customers sit in that decline.

Two things stand out: Chipotle’s customers are consistently six to seven points more confident than the average adult, consistent with a base that skews younger and higher-income, and their confidence moves with the economy, not against it.

That’s the macro story made specific. The brand’s own customers are feeling the pinch, their timing matches the economy’s, and nothing in the pattern points to a cause particular to the brand. If sales are soft, the chart shows why.

Checking against the competition

The next natural question is whether competitors’ customers are under the same pressure. If they are, the softness is shared; if Chipotle’s customers are pulling back harder than Panera’s or In-N-Out’s, the brand has a customer-mix problem to explain.

Prompt

Add Panera and In-N-Out customers as separate lines. Whose customers have lost the most confidence since last summer?

The AI tool defines each competitor’s customers the same way (any reported purchase frequency), pulls their sentiment over the same window and ranks the decline. Chipotle’s customers have lost the least. Summer to summer, their index fell about seven points (103 to 95), less than the all-adult decline of eight, less than Panera’s customers (down ten, 104 to 94), and well short of In-N-Out’s customers (down twelve, 114 to 103) and affluent households generally (down fourteen, 123 to 109).

Natural next questions from here:

• “Break Chipotle customers’ index into its five components. Is it their current finances or their expectations that fell?”

• “Show Chipotle customers’ sentiment by income band. Is the decline coming from our affluent customers or our value-conscious ones?”

• “Overlay our quarterly same-store sales on the customer sentiment line and tell me how many months the index led them.”

Keep in mind

Name the segment that matters, not just “consumers.” “$100k+ households” is the audience a fast-casual chain, a spirits brand or a luxury retailer actually depends on. Overall sentiment can hide a sharp move in the segment that drives your revenue, and the tool will cut the index by any income band you name.

You can put your own customers on the chart. “Consumers who say they are customers of [brand]” is an audience you can define, because we ask every respondent what they buy. This audience-specific line turns a macro chart into one that’s significantly more useful: not how consumers feel in general, but how yours do.