Trends Briefing: 100 Waves of Optimism
Thursday 30th April 2026
0900-1000
The very first wave of the Optimism Index ran in January 2018.
Back then, it was a simple omnibus survey, asking a handful of questions designed to understand the mood of the nation and the public’s short term outlook. This month, we ran the 100th wave of the Optimism Index. That same handful of questions we first asked about back in 2018 – trust, nostalgia, consumer confidence, global anxiety – are all still there, joining by dozens of others each wave from a variable library of thousands.
The tracker is no longer a modest omnibus but a detailed, modular survey and a vast dataset covering everything from AI adoption to solar panel purchase, from attendance at protests to barriers to volunteering and from drinking and leisure habits to life events and financial milestones. We’ve amassed more than 150,000 interviews in this time, with our headline Optimism metric itself – along with other information on spending, charity behaviours, sustainability and financial wellbeing – becoming essential indicators for our growing legion of subscribers.
In our next trends briefing webinar we’ll be digging through this 100-wave archive of consumer sentiment to take a long term view of the national mood and identify where it might go next. We’ll reveal what we’ve learnt about what influences the public’s mood and how non-financial measures of sentiment, like Optimism, interact with financial ones, like consumer confidence and leisure spending. We’ll also look closely at what recent changes in the consumer mood will mean for the rest of the year ahead.
As ever, our analysis will come packed with exclusive, hot-off-the-press data and implications for strategists, planners and campaigners.
Register here to attend
Every month we host webinar looking in detail at a core trend, topic or issue. Although the briefing is free to attend, only our Now & Next members will have access to the presentation and data afterwards, alongside our library of macro trends, detailed reports and Optimism Index data. Click here to find out more about subscribing and request a demo.