Portrait of the consumer: alone, frugal, and distrustful
Three extra hours of free time per week, 90 % of it spent alone, and social media ranked last in trust. What McKinsey 2025 changes.
Key takeaways
- American consumers have three extra hours of free time per week compared to 2019, spending about 90 % of it alone.
- Social media is the least trusted source when making a purchase decision, even though we have never spent so much time on it.
- 73 % of 13-39-year-olds trust smaller creators more than big names: the channel holds, but the messenger is changing.
- Frugal and big-spending are not contradictory: customers cut back on essentials to spend on what matters to them.
- Targeting improves a message's deliverability, never its credibility. That is the ceiling reached after a decade of data-driven marketing.
I am alone but online, frugal but ready to spend, distrustful but seeking connection… Who am I?
A consumer.
This contradictory portrait emerges from State of the Consumer 2025 : When disruption becomes permanent, published by McKinsey on June 9, 2025, and based on more than 25 000 respondents across 18 markets. What stands out is the speed: behaviors are shifting faster than the strategies designed to keep up with them.
Three takeaways for brands, and one uncomfortable conclusion.
Why do consumers want to participate, not just buy?
Because interaction has become the cost of admission for attention. Customers want to play, share, be recognized, and have an active role.
It is a demand for interaction, directed at digital marketing that is still largely built on interruption.
The advice from Christina Adams and Carrie Eldridge, who lead McKinsey’s ConsumerWise group, boils down to one sentence: reduce friction and explore gamification to engage with consumers where they are.
Two key concepts to keep in mind.
Friction, first, because it is the primary reason participatory programs fail. A customer journey that requires creating an account, remembering a promo code, and checking a dedicated portal for balances offers an exit door at every step. Sharing in two clicks on WhatsApp, on the other hand, requires zero learning curve.
Where they are, second. Translation: in their private conversations, messaging apps, closed groups, and family chats. That is precisely where your measurement tools hit a wall, since any link shared in WhatsApp, Slack, or Discord lands on your site without any referrer. Direct traffic actually accounts for about 37 % of site visitors, part of which is word-of-mouth that no one has tracked (see the details on dark social).
Going “where they are” means stepping outside the territory you know how to measure. Or giving yourself the tools to measure it.
Why is trust in social media collapsing?
Because time spent and trust earned have parted ways. On one hand, McKinsey measures three extra hours of free time per week for American consumers compared to 2019, with about 90 % of it spent alone, screen time included. On the other hand, these same social networks rank as the least trusted source when deciding on a purchase, while half of Americans point first to recommendations from family and friends.
The two curves are heading in opposite directions, yet ad budgets continue to chase the first one.
The signs of distrust are piling up:
- 57 % of French consumers use an ad blocker, 70 % find online ads too numerous, and 60 % find them too intrusive (mind Media × 366, avril 2025).
- 62 % of 13-39-year-olds say they are tired of seeing the same big names, and 73 % trust smaller creators more (YPulse, Celebrities and Influencers Report).
- 88 % of consumers say they trust recommendations from people they know more than any other channel, 50 % more than the lowest-ranked formats, led by banner ads and sponsored links (Nielsen, Trust in Advertising 2021).
Generative AI is accelerating the shift. When any image, any review, or any testimonial can be generated in thirty seconds, genuine proof becomes rare, and therefore valuable. The only format that cannot be synthesized at scale is someone you know telling you they bought something and loved it.
I expanded on this elsewhere: what we are experiencing is first and foremost a crisis of trust, and it calls for completely different solutions than an ad creative problem.
Should you shift your budget away from social media?
Partly, yes. McKinsey’s advice is clear: re-evaluate overall spend allocation and move a portion of it away from social networks.
An important nuance. Social commerce retains all its value: that is where discovery happens. What is expiring is the belief that credibility can come from a creator paid to produce it. The channel remains effective. The messenger is what changes.
In concrete terms, shifting budget means stopping buying reach to fund peer recommendations instead. At Frak, this shift takes a straightforward form: the brand sets its customer acquisition cost upfront, and on a 10 € CAC, 8 € goes to the referring customer and 2 € to the platform. No setup fees, no spend without an attributed sale.
A media budget buys impressions from people who don’t know you. That same budget, paid out to your customers, funds an endorsement from someone whose opinion already matters to the recipient. Paying for this still raises eyebrows, and I address it here: word of mouth is free, so why pay for it?
Frugal yet ready to spend: how to read this paradox
There is no contradiction here, just a hierarchy of priorities that has become explicit.
Consumers now make tradeoffs based on true value: emotional, human, relational, local. The lowest price is back to being just one factor among many. They cut back drastically on everyday expenses to treat themselves elsewhere, often spending well beyond what they just saved.
A strategy built around price or ad volume misses its mark twice: it shouts at an audience that barely listens, focusing on a criterion that no longer drives the final decision.
Growth belongs to brands capable of building an ecosystem of trust around themselves. Academic research on customer referrals shows what that trust is worth: referred customers have an estimated 18 % higher retention rate, a higher lifetime value, and refer others 31 to 57 % more than customers acquired through other channels (Schmitt, Skiera et Van den Bulte, Wharton).
In other words, a referred customer arrives with goodwill that three months of retargeting cannot build.
Targeting has reached its limit
The winning brands won’t be the ones that target best, but the ones that listen to, connect, and reward their communities.
Targeting was the defining skill of the past decade. Data, lookalike audiences, retargeting, algorithmic optimization: we learned how to deliver the right message to the right person at the right time.
It is no longer enough, for a mechanical reason: targeting improves a message’s deliverability, never its credibility. Today, you can reach the exact right person with a message they don’t believe. The budget is spent, the impression is logged, the dashboard turns green, and nothing happened in the mind of the person scrolling past.
Add the fact that targeting itself is harder to measure than before, between the demise of third-party cookies and browser privacy protections, and you end up with a more expensive channel delivering results no one can truly prove.
Only one mechanism answers all three expectations
Side by side:
| What the consumer wants | What it requires | What most brands do |
|---|---|---|
| Interaction and participation | Give them an active role and a reward | Expose them to an ad message |
| Proof | A credible source not on the brand’s payroll | Produce more brand content |
| Connection | An ongoing relationship in their own channels | Buy one more impression |
One mechanism checks all three boxes at once: peer-to-peer recommendation, explored in We are all influencers.
It gives customers an active role, since they share and get paid for the sales they generate. It provides proof, since the person speaking bought the product out of their own pocket. And it is built on connection by design: it only circulates between people who know each other, or it doesn’t circulate at all.
When all three findings of a consumer behavior study point toward the same mechanism, it is because that mechanism predates all of us. Recommending is a spontaneous behavior that marketing simply lacked the tools to support, reward, and measure.
Now we can measure it. Across the early brands we power, we observe an acquisition cost that is 26 % lower on average and up to 40 % of sales driven by customer recommendations. The methodology is broken down in How to manage word of mouth like paid media.
Frequently asked questions
What is McKinsey’s State of the Consumer report?
It is McKinsey’s annual study on how consumers allocate their time and money. The 2025 edition, subtitled When disruption becomes permanent and published on June 9, 2025, draws on more than 25 000 respondents across 18 markets, covering spending trade-offs, digital habits, and trust in brands.
Why do consumers distrust influencers?
Because sponsorships have become visible and systematic. Among 13-39-year-olds, 62 % say they are tired of seeing the same big names, and 73 % trust smaller creators more. What damages trust is seeing a stranger with a large following get paid to appear authentic.
How do you reward a customer who recommends your brand?
By paying out cash immediately once a referred sale is confirmed. The brand sets its acquisition cost in advance and splits it: on a 10 € CAC, 8 € can go to the customer and 2 € to the platform. Customers know what they earn before sharing, with no tiers and no expiration dates.
Is gamification enough to engage a skeptical consumer?
No. Gamification reduces friction and makes an action enjoyable, but a branded game is still brand messaging. It works when it wraps around a mechanic that already makes sense to the customer: recommending a product they love and use, and getting paid for it.
I’m Virginie Maire, co-founder of Frak Labs, which turns your customers into a scalable, profitable, and authentic acquisition channel. A committed entrepreneur and mother of two, I’ve spent 20 years navigating media, social networks, influencer marketing, and e-commerce… and I’m still having just as much fun!