On the latest episode of the Change Agents podcast, Alter Agents Founder and CEO Rebecca Brooks joins Chief Strategy Officer Devora Rogers to unpack findings from Alter Agents’ long-running Consumer Sentiment study, tracked since 2019 across waves of 1,300 Americans. Rebecca and Devora dig into what they’re calling the “trust recession” — a collapse in consumer confidence that’s reshaping how people shop, why loyalty has quietly become risk mitigation, and what brands need to do to earn trust back.

This tracking study has been running for a while now — tell us about it.

This is a project we started in 2019, pre-COVID, pre a lot, actually — a totally different timeline. We’ve been tracking how people are feeling about the economy, shopping, and how they’re spending their money, looking at all of these different factors. We recently published the latest round of research, and what we’ve been watching is a shift that happened slowly on the margins and then exploded in the last year. The study is done with 1,300 Americans in every wave, so we’ve got a nice big base size and can cut the data by all sorts of different factors.

Picture this: you need a new vacuum, or an air purifier, or maybe just a place to store your shoes at the entryway. What’s the process for that now?

It’s so fascinating — you and I in particular have been doing shopper research for 16 years, and we’ve watched it change so dramatically. In the beginning, maybe the first 15 years, we talked about the logistics of shopping — the number of sources available, the way distribution and advertising channels opened up, and all of the information that came to the shopper and created a really different experience.

What we’re seeing now is that recently there’s been a new emotional experience layered on top of all that. When you’re making a shopping decision you care about, you’re using all of those resources in a different way, emotionally. You’re three hours deep into a Reddit thread from 2020. You’re watching four deinfluencing TikToks. You’re cross-referencing five different browser tabs just to make sure you aren’t getting scammed, that what you’re looking at is actually valid, that it’s been used by real people. That’s the process now, and it carries a different emotional context than before.

It sounds exhausting. Is that part of a bigger shift in power between buyers and sellers?

It’s not fun anymore. For years, our industry has talked about how the power has shifted from the seller to the buyer — the buyer can access all the information now, which gives them a lot of power. But the responsibility has also shifted to the buyer. We’re the ones who have to make sure we’re buying something good and legitimate, that we’re not getting scammed.

It feels like shopping’s become a part-time job I never applied for — you have to do homework just to buy basics. And it leads to a bigger question we’ve been asking lately: is the joy of shopping — the way my mom shopped for stress relief, touching everything at the mall on a Saturday — a thing of the past, or is it just changing?

Let’s get into why. You’re calling this phenomenon the trust recession. What does that mean?

If we think about shopping before 2020, there was even a term for it — shoptomism. People were excited about all of these new channels opening up, all of these new opportunities. People were curious, interested, wanted to find new products, and we believed those products would work, that they’d be as advertised. We assumed a brand was generally telling the truth. That optimism bubble hasn’t just shrunk — it’s burst.

In the latest study, the numbers were staggering: only 25% of consumers actually look forward to shopping right now. One in four. What’s going on?

There are a lot of things at play — fear of fraud, having had fraudulent experiences. I think we’ve all made that Instagram purchase at two in the morning, thinking it was going to be the thing that saved our aging skin or fixed our kitchen organization problem, and we’ve had experiences that were deeply disappointing. Now we’re on the defensive. We feel like we’re at risk of being victimized every time we shop, and it’s our responsibility to make sure we’re not being used.

We used to shop to find something we liked that added to our lives — it was relaxing, entertaining. Now we’re shopping, and doing all of this research, just to prove the purchase is safe and worthwhile. And the other reason this is so critical is that economic pressure is shrinking our wallets, so the dollars we’re spending are less disposable and more necessary — we need to make the right decisions.

For years, value was the number one thing shoppers said drove their decisions. Then function and quality took over. Where are we now?

There’s no scarcity of stuff — look at Amazon on any given day, or scroll your social feeds, and you’re inundated. But there’s a massive scarcity of confidence. We don’t really believe what we’re being told anymore. We’ve become these hyper-analytical, pragmatic survivors, trying to navigate an endless world of options as our wallets shrink and our debts mount.

So how did we get this cynical? Your research points to three specific pressure points. Let’s start with pressure point one.

We’re in a polycrisis, so keeping it to three was actually challenging. Pressure point number one is obvious — it’s the economy. But the twist is that the headlines say things are fine, because top-earning households are still spending. Our data, and other data we’ve pulled from other researchers, shows that if you look more closely at an average person’s spending habits, 79% of Americans — four out of five — are actively cutting back on non-essentials. Even people who can’t really afford it are cutting back, and that’s going to have a huge cascading impact on all of us.

It goes even deeper — over a third of people are cutting back on essentials, like utilities and childcare. And when we asked people whether they think their future will be better, only 66% agreed — down 15 points from our 2019 baseline. What’s behind that?

We’ve been buying into the American dream — prosperity, growth, opportunity — so seeing that a third of our fellow Americans are feeling dispirited, feeling like it won’t get better than this, is stark. Certainly in my lifetime, I’ve never seen that number so high. One of the other things that’s interesting about the economy right now is that in past difficult economic times — the 2008 housing crisis, post-9/11 — our government took action. There were stimulus packages, economic relief, stimulus checks, a safety net to help people navigate and weather it. That’s not happening right now, and that missing safety net changes our mindset. It makes every dollar spent feel higher stakes — there’s nobody looking out to make sure we’re going to be okay.

How is this impacting shopper behavior?

In our data, we found that one in three consumers are making shopping trade-offs — switching down to lower-priced brands, buying private label. Walmart tends to be the brand people trade down to when they need to save money — there’s really nothing below it at that scale and efficiency, aside from dollar stores. So if Walmart has become too expensive, where do you go? Walmart’s own CEO has mentioned that gas prices are really impacting his consumers’ ability to spend. The floor of the retail experience is falling out from under people, and it’s an open question where they go next.

Let’s talk about pressure point two: peak optimization. Retailers thought they were building the perfect experience for shoppers — what did you actually find?

It’s the optimization trap. Under the guise of meeting the consumer where they are — how many times have we heard that at conferences — what we’ve actually done is insert ourselves into people’s lives in a really intrusive, unwelcome way. People see 10,000 ads a day, whether through social media, traditional advertising, or Facebook posts that present as friends but are actually brands. There’s so much more advertising allowed into our daily content now — Netflix, for example, charges a higher subscription fee if you want to avoid ads.

About 40% of people walk away. They’re just not in the mood to shop, they don’t want to be inundated with advertising. We’re not meeting them where they’re at — we’re interrupting where they are. And your brain short-circuits from the sheer number of options, which is why so many people leave things in their cart, walking away from decisions because it’s just overwhelming.

Then there’s the AI factor — AI-generated content has caught up to, or nearly surpassed, human-generated content, and it’s not always clear whether a review is from a person or a bot. That leads into pressure point three.

That’s the trust fall — or really, the failed trust fall. Trusting a brand used to be the default — think about Tide, or Coke, these iconic brands. Now, only 28% of people believe that companies are being transparent with them.

When you started this shopper journey work 16 years ago, the conversation was mostly about loyalty. What’s changed?

Back then, we talked about how loyalty was dying — my dad was a Chevy man who wouldn’t buy anything else, until that changed for him later in life — and people were moving away from loyalty, becoming more exploratory, eager to try new brands. But what we’ve encountered since is a lot of disappointment, a lot of fraud, a lot of things that didn’t work as advertised — products that were rushed to market and quickly proven not to be useful. So now it’s not about loyalty, it’s about trust in general.

82% of us are regularly seeing fake reviews, so we don’t look at five-star reviews anymore. Now we’re going for the low-star reviews — where are the real reviews, the pictures people posted of the product that actually look like they’re from someone’s real home, the videos that are shaky and handheld that you know a real person made.

Trust doesn’t seem to stay contained to one category — it seems to bleed into everything.

Trust isn’t just connected to an experience with a product or a brand — it’s interconnected with so many things. The human brain differs from great apes and monkeys in a lot of ways, but one of the most critical is that we have more neural pathways connecting the different parts of our brain to each other, meaning we can make connections between language, art, science, culture, all of it. What that also means is that when trust starts to erode in one area, it starts to decline everywhere. In our research, 70% of people say they don’t know what to believe anymore, and 34% of consumers say they can’t trust each other.

That last stat — only a third of consumers say they trust each other — is a hard one to sit with. What’s driving that kind of erosion, beyond the shopping experience itself?

It feels really bad. We’ve talked about low-confidence economies — Peter Atwater talks about how when your confidence in the economy is low, you become a “me, here, now” instead of an “us, together, forever.” People are really in that mindset of protecting themselves and what’s theirs, because they don’t trust what’s going on out there. Confidence in our government institutions is waning too — only 17% of Americans trust the federal government to do the right thing. That’s been declining since Nixon, really, but this is a drop-off, not just a slope. And when you don’t have confidence in your systems and institutions, it bleeds into your confidence in brands, in reviews, in your neighbor. We’re all becoming more skeptical, cynical and paranoid.

One thing that stood out to me recently: I was listening to my 11-year-old daughter singing and dancing along to a song by one of her favorite groups, about the world ending and having a party while it burns down, because that’s the only thing left to do — lyrics like “I wanna live large right before it all burns down.” That’s dystopian. And it makes me think about the longer arc of this. I don’t know that what’s happening right now is going to be as deeply ingrained as, say, the Great Depression, which created a generation of children raised in scarcity and fear that shaped how they lived for the rest of their lives — but who knows what that 11-year-old looks like in 50 years.

So what does this look like in the wild?

There’s a term for it — the messy middle — and it’s getting much, much messier. The time between thinking about buying something and actually buying it is stretching out, and purchases are increasingly being abandoned altogether, because it’s just too difficult to get through.

Walk us through what that actually looks like. Let’s go back to that air purifier from the top of the show — you see an ad on Instagram, the aesthetics are great. A couple of years ago, you’d have clicked and bought it. Today?

You don’t trust that ad for a second. So you go to Amazon — but you skip the five-star reviews. Now you’re reading the three-star and one-star reviews, because you want to see what breaks, whether you can accept the downsides. Then you’re not done — you go open a tab in Reddit and search for the best version of the product, to get a crowdsourced opinion from people who actually own it. But then, how do you fully trust that either? So then it’s on to TikTok — not the polished ad, but the shaky video, the messy apartment, the sound of how loud the thing actually is.

It’s like you’ve got a cork board up with red string, and you’re triangulating all of these pieces of information — not to get to 100% confidence, but to mitigate the risk. You’re looking for where the story is most consistent, what proof you actually have. And if you can’t make that triangulation work, you abandon it — you walk away, even after putting in all of that time, effort and emotional energy.

And when the package finally arrives, there isn’t really a spark of joy anymore — it’s more like, “okay, it’s not destroyed.”

Let’s hope it doesn’t suck. There’s no Marie Kondo, spark-of-joy moment — no sense that this is going to make your life better. It’s more like, I think I made the least-worst decision I could make. So, I didn’t get ripped off — that’s the ceiling we’re at. We’ve traded excitement for mitigated regret.

That tracks with what other research is showing too — the American Customer Satisfaction Index, which has been tracking this for 50 years, is at an all-time low. Is there any silver lining here?

Because of all this digital distrust, we’re actually seeing people, especially Gen Z, going back into physical stores. Those are the ultimate validation zones — you can’t fake a fabric sample, you can’t fake the performance of a product in the store. You can go touch the box, look at the product firsthand, and know there’s a return system in place if it doesn’t work out — a customer service counter, more tangible, real things you can do in the store that feel like they’re helping you mitigate that risk.

So has loyalty itself changed shape? It sounds less like emotional affinity now, and more like risk mitigation.

Right — I’ll stick with this brand because they won’t mess up my shipping, the return policy’s clear, the quality’s fine. It’s a marriage of convenience, not passion. Years ago, a friend’s cousins got VW logos tattooed on their calves while visiting — that’s the kind of loyalty that comes from aspiring to what a brand represents. You don’t really see that anymore, even with high-fashion, high-dollar brands — they’re less aspirational and more about status now. Brand loyalty today is really just, “they haven’t burned me yet,” so it feels safer.

Is this a phase, or is it here to stay?

I don’t know what the path back looks like. I mentioned the Great Depression earlier — that was generations of people moving away from a mindset that was created by scarcity. I don’t know that what’s happening right now will be as deeply ingrained as that, but my feeling is: yes, this is here to stay for a while. How do we earn back trust, get back to a place where we can shop happy? Number one, we need our wallets to be fatter — I don’t know when that’s coming. Number two, we need to have faith in institutions and brands and our systems again — I don’t know when that’s coming either. So for a while, we’re going to be doing this value-seeking, this auditing, this corkboard-and-red-string triangulation. That’s here to stay until these bigger issues get resolved.

If you’re a brand marketer listening to this, what do you do? Stop selling the dream, and start selling — what, certainty?

Lean hard into radical transparency. The slick ad, the beautiful product, the snazzy music, the great graphics — all of that can be faked now, and people know that perfection is a marketing lie. Show them why your premium jacket costs $300. Talk about the quality, the human investment, the cost of materials. Be open and transparent about the longevity of your products, and really earn trust before you do anything else.

The second lever might be highlighting craft. We’re seeing early signs of pushback against an all-AI world — people still crave a human touch, so maybe that means showing the messy human process of how a product is actually made.

To that point, it’s also about rethinking who speaks for your brand. We found that peer-to-peer networks and nano-influencers are now the most trusted resource for consumers. Larger influencers have been bought — they’re not authentic anymore. Nano-influencers with a small audience, showing us their messy house, are considered safe and honest — we saw this in our work with Whaler. Think about a celebrity endorser: no one believes they’re actually using that product or believes what they’re saying, because we know they’re being paid. Don’t hide behind fake people. Bring the real people out to the front.

So there’s now an extra layer of emotional labor on top of everything else — not just checking one-, two- and three-star reviews, but also checking an influencer’s follower count and cross-referencing that too.

Right — or scrolling down their feed to see how many other products they’re endorsing, and whether those are good or not, and using that as a barometer for how much you can trust them.