William Pink

Senior Vice President, Brand and Data Strategy, Morning Consult; Husband, Father, Coach; Views are my own.

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

We've tracked trust in nearly 600 brands continuously since 2018. What we've learned: the typical brand moves less than 1.5 points a year.

Trust is slow to build, slow to lose, and impossible to fake. See who's earned it in 2026: https://t.co/Bi8b1x5hsJ

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

Olive Garden is the most-loved, most-considered brand in casual dining — and it’s leaving frequency on the table.
https://t.co/Z06ni6Ubfa

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

Buffalo Wild Wings is the category’s clearest specialist — dominant on one occasion, peripheral on most.

No brand in the category owns a single moment the way BWW owns watching sports. https://t.co/mwRg8MythS

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

GLP-1 status reshapes a consumer's relationship with energy drinks in ways that age, income, or gender do not https://t.co/CRUn4aYz7E

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

Red Bull and Monster sit at the top of the energy drink category, together holding roughly 40% of its mental real estate, and the gap to everyone else is real
https://t.co/VxEwbqs9Ik

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

Vuori is the category’s most compelling under-the-radar story. At 9.3% awareness, the brand is barely known — but among those who know it, 51.6% link it to at least one purchase occasion. https://t.co/i8r1Ut09Qj

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

.@Nike is the undisputed mental availability leader in athletic apparel — 22% Mental Market Share, the broadest Network Size in the category, 84% mental penetration among brand-aware consumers, and the highest emotional connection score of any brand
https://t.co/oz1X6AbzMQ

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

Athletic apparel is a near-universal category with a genuinely fragmented mental landscape. Nike leads by a wide margin — 22% Mental Market Share, the broadest occasion footprint in the study — but the category’s top purchase triggers are mundane ones. https://t.co/GCmfBX4suk

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

Trying a new fragrance (~33%) --the single largest trigger and the most open playing field in the fragrance category. No brand dominates: Bath & Body Works leads at 32%, Le Labo and Sol de Janeiro follow at ~29% each. https://t.co/oAS48ni6Mj

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

Mass brands — Dove, Head & Shoulders, Suave, Pantene — win the autopilot moments in the haircare category: what’s running low, what just ran out, what fits the regular routine.

Together they account for roughly 46% of the category’s mental real estate. https://t.co/XQluZoBIhA

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

ChatGPT remains the U.S. consumer AI category’s mental-availability leader by every measure — 85% awareness, 67% mental penetration, and the broadest network of CEP associations.
https://t.co/OYnKa0Wogf

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

Here are the three biggest brand storylines from our latest wave of Consumer AI research:

1. Gemini and ChatGPT continue to bracket the category — Gemini consolidating its hold on search-replacement and information utility, ChatGPT defending the conversational and creative lane.

2. The breakout story is Claude — +13pp awareness, +5pp mental penetration, +4pp active use over four months, with gains concentrated almost exclusively in the $100K+ and post-graduate segments where premium-tier conversion happens.

3. Distribution-led brands (such as Meta AI) continue to lose AI mind-share. The thesis that preinstallation alone would build durable AI brand preference is not playing out — these brands have ecosystem reach but are not capturing AI moments at the rate their footprint would suggest.

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

LinkedIn owns professional networking.

It has a mental advantage score of +29 is the second-largest brand-CEP pairing in the entire dataset, surpassed only by Facebook’s grip on friends-and-family. No competitor is positioned to threaten it.

https://t.co/7XSzvIJpaS

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

The American drinking landscape looks stable at the surface—a handful of familiar moments still drive most consumption. But beneath that stability, the mental map of what belongs in each occasion is diverging sharply by generation and gender.

https://t.co/2OA83uapeS

[Michael Ramlet @MichaelRamlet]

Regional wealth firms average just 17% national awareness.

Yet they convert that awareness into mental penetration at 2.3x the rate of every other segment in the category.

Invisible nationally. Dominant locally.

https://t.co/reuEZTcazL

[Michael Ramlet @MichaelRamlet]

The firms that win wealth management's next growth phase won't have the best rates or the slickest app. They'll be the ones consumers think of first — across the most life moments. Mental scale is the new competitive moat. https://t.co/9FRFKFtomH

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

Southwest Airlines is the category’s most efficient entry brand, winning not through premium reassurance or network dominance, but by removing reasons to say no at the point of entry https://t.co/MUOaK8R9p5

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

.@united over-indexes on:

— Nonstop timing
— Flying from the nearest airport
— Upgrade availability
— Safety confidence

It’s mentally positioned as “the airline that can handle the trip.” https://t.co/wM7jy0XIkM

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

.@Delta is the airline category’s strongest reassurance brand.

It wins not on price, but on trust, care, and confidence when the trip matters most.

Our latest analysis ⬇️
https://t.co/Q3dIfMJlKU

[Morning Consult @MorningConsult]

Fast casual dining growth isn’t about innovation—it’s about availability.

The brands winning today show up when consumers are too tired to cook, want value, or need dinner on the way home.

📊 New Morning Consult data → https://t.co/K8tjSS6uil