June 28th, 2023, Janice Fernandes
Recent news reveals that Europe has banned certain products with food additives that are reported to cause health issues - yet these same goods are still legal in the US. We ran a survey across 18 international markets to understand how consumers would react if they read a media report about health and safety concerns related to a product they regularly use or consume.
Marketers would be interested to know that polling data from YouGov Surveys: Serviced reveals that consumers don’t take media reports about health and safety concerns related to a product they regularly use or consume at face value. Over half of global consumers (52%) would look for more information about what's stated in the report before making a decision.
North Americans (57%) along with Europeans (53%) are slightly more likely than global respondents to conduct their own research before deciding what to do. Consumers in APAC (48%) and MENA (42%) are slightly less likely than other consumers to look for more information but are still more likely to react in this way than any other.
Around 16% of global respondents would drop the product right away. More than two in ten APAC (23%) and UAE (21%) consumers would immediately stop using/consuming a product if there’s any negative report about it in the media, the highest of all regions, but it’s more like one in eight consumers in North America (13%) and Europe (12%).
Only around one in 20 global consumers (6%) would wait for regulatory bodies to decide before making any changes. A similar proportion of consumers around the world share this reaction – North America (5%), Europe (7%), APAC (6%) and UAE (7%).
Consumers in UAE are nearly twice as likely as global respondents to say they would continue using/consuming the product because they trust the manufacturer’s safety testing and quality control processes (10% vs 6%).
A very small proportion of people in all regions surveyed say they would not believe the media reports either because they believe the reports to be sensationalized or have had a positive experience with the product and think it’s safe.
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Methodology: YouGov Surveys: Serviced provide quick survey results from nationally representative or targeted audiences in multiple markets. The data is based on surveys of adults aged 18+ years in 18 markets with sample sizes varying between 512 and 2005 for each market. All surveys were conducted online in April 2023. Data from each market uses a nationally representative sample apart from Mexico and India, which use urban representative samples, and Indonesia and Hong Kong, which use online representative samples. Learn more about YouGov Surveys: Serviced.
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