The 2020s have been a lot.
Lockdowns. A global reckoning on race and inequality. The strangest, most politically turbulent few years in living memory. But alongside the difficult, something else happened too – a string of genuinely joyful, unifying cultural moments that reminded us what it feels like to be part of something bigger than ourselves.
The UK hosted Eurovision. We lived through ‘Brat Summer’. The Lionesses changed how an entire nation talks about women’s sport. Millions stayed up past their bedtime for the Paris Olympics. The Traitors became one of those rare shows everyone seemed to be talking about at once. The Oasis reunion – yes, that actually happened – broke ticketing systems and dominated group chats for weeks. Every few months, another cultural moment seems to cut through and pull people into the same conversation.
These aren’t just nice things to talk about. For market researchers, they represent something genuinely important: the rare moments when people are most themselves, most engaged, and most willing to share.
Cultural trends, as a research context, aren’t a gimmick. They’re a window. And if you know how to use them, they can produce some of the richest qualitative insight you’ll ever collect.
Cultural moments create community – and community is the foundation of good research
There’s something that happens to people during big shared events. Something that’s hard to manufacture and impossible to fake.
Lisa Boughton, Director and Co-founder of Angelfish Fieldwork, puts it well:
“I think it’s about creating community. The 2012 Olympics was the biggest example of this in my time. The cultural moment, community and feel-good factor was incredible – the buzz, the happiness, the celebrating together, talking to your neighbour on the train, in the queue at the supermarket. This is a human instinct – we need unity, we thrive in community, and we tend to enjoy a common goal.”
She’s right. These events make us lift our heads. They change our headspace. Whether it’s a World Cup, the Olympics, Glastonbury, or even Christmas – people temporarily stop operating in their own little bubble and become part of something shared. And in that state, they’re more reflective, more articulate, and more motivated to engage.
That matters enormously in research. Feeling part of something bigger – whether that’s a sports tournament, a national conversation, or an online community built around a shared interest – is one of the most reliable motivators for participation. People don’t just want to give feedback. They want to contribute. They feel like their voice counts, and that the insight they share might genuinely benefit something they care about.
Harry Davies, Client Services Manager, captures another dimension of this beautifully:
“Six Nations is basically the only other time in a year, aside from Christmas, when you’ll find all my family in one place. Having a common link as the excuse to bring everyone together can be such a good thing, even if it is something as ridiculous as 25 extremely naff songs and a collective tongue-in-cheek laugh at your own country for being utterly useless at it.”
That spirit of togetherness – even the self-deprecating, slightly chaotic kind – is exactly the energy that makes focus groups sing, duo-interviews spark, and online communities come alive. When participants feel a sense of shared investment, they inspire each other. They build on each other’s ideas. The group dynamic shifts from transactional to genuinely conversational.
The demographic assumptions cultural moments break
One of the most quietly significant things about major cultural events is how thoroughly they disrupt our assumptions about who cares about what.
Think about Barbenheimer. How many men queued up for Barbie, despite it supposedly not being ‘for them’?
Cultural moments have a habit of pulling in people you wouldn’t necessarily expect. Suddenly, people who’d never usually watch football are emotionally invested in every match, and people who haven’t thought about Eurovision in years are debating it in the group chat.
Researchers who go looking for ‘male football fans aged 25–45’ will find them. But they’ll miss the grandmother who’s watched every England game since 1966, the teenage girl who can name every squad member, and the person who doesn’t follow football at all but finds themselves swept up in the collective excitement anyway.
Big cultural moments level the playing field. They create shared experiences that cut across age, gender, background and buying habit – and that’s an opportunity, not a complication. Research designed around them has the chance to be more representative, more surprising, and more honest about who actually uses your product, and why.
It’s also worth noting that generations are frequently defined by the cultural events they live through. Gen Z’s worldview was shaped by the rise of the smartphone and the experience of a global pandemic. Millennials came of age to a very different backdrop. Understanding how cultural touchstones filter through into attitude and behaviour is not a peripheral concern for insight teams – it’s central to understanding why people do what they do.
Engagement goes up. And so does data quality.
There’s a practical argument here that sits alongside the philosophical one, and it’s hard to ignore.
Molly Ebdon, Fieldwork Manager at Angelfish, makes it plainly:
“I think it’s a much easier discussion point than something more mundane. People are going to give you far richer feedback on something they care about as opposed to the everyday shopping-type projects. The application rates are normally way higher too, because people feel they genuinely have something to say.”
This is a real pattern, not anecdotal. When people are emotionally invested in a topic, the data is better. Not just more plentiful – richer, more considered, more nuanced. The difference between a participant going through the motions and a participant who actually cares is audible within minutes.
There’s also a timeliness argument. Cultural moments give researchers access to in-the-moment thinking – reactions that haven’t been filtered, rationalised or tidied up with the benefit of hindsight. If you want to understand how a low-alcohol drinks brand lands during World Cup season, the time to ask is during World Cup season. Not six weeks later when the emotion has faded and people are back to their routines.
The methods available to researchers during these windows are worth considering too. Ethnographic approaches – observing people in their real-life viewing parties, pub gatherings, or family living rooms – offer something no interview ever quite can: actual behaviour in context. Social listening during a tournament can surface organic sentiment at a scale that’s impossible to replicate in a studio. Diary studies over the course of a major event track how attitudes evolve in real time.
You can already see this playing out across sectors. Brands researching food and drink habits during major sporting tournaments often uncover behaviours that wouldn’t appear in a standard interview setting – from spontaneous hosting rituals to impulse supermarket purchases and shifts in alcohol consumption. These moments reveal what people actually do, not just what they say they do.
These aren’t nice-to-haves. They’re the kind of insight that actually changes how brands behave.
The human case for culturally-grounded research
There’s a broader principle running through all of this that we think is worth naming directly.
In a research industry that is increasingly asking how much of the human element can be automated, optimised, or replaced – cultural moments are a reminder of why human qualitative research exists in the first place. They are precisely the contexts in which what people feel, believe and experience cannot be reduced to a data point.
The joy of watching your team win. The strange solidarity of watching them lose. The collective delirium of an Oasis gig announcement. These things matter to people in ways that take a skilled, curious, warm human researcher to properly explore.
For qualitative researchers, these moments are often where the most revealing conversations happen. When people care, research changes. Conversations become more open, more emotional and more honest. And that’s often where the most valuable insight lives.
If you’re planning research and wondering whether to build it around a major cultural moment – our answer is yes. The conditions are right. The participants are ready. And the insights are waiting.
See how we put this into practice during the 2024 Euros.
