Today’s market leaders face a complex environment characterized by simultaneous progress and pressure. Consumers are both inspired by new possibilities and fatigued by ongoing uncertainty. This dynamic, termed the “Age of Dissonance” by The Harris Poll, highlights a fundamental shift: a world where traditional notions of reality and trust are being reshaped. For senior marketing and CX leaders, understanding these undercurrents is crucial for designing strategies that resonate, build trust, and drive measurable value. This article distills key insights from The Harris Poll’s “Age of Dissonance” report, outlining the defining tensions, emerging consumer behaviors, and strategic imperatives for brands seeking relevance and resilience.
The Core Tensions Reshaping Consumer Behavior
Three foundational tensions are currently redefining consumer expectations and shaping purchasing decisions. Brands that acknowledge and skillfully address these paradoxes will foster deeper connections and maintain authenticity.
- AI Hope Versus AI Obsolescence: Artificial intelligence represents both a catalyst for innovation and a source of collective anxiety. While a 2024 Google Workspace-Harris Poll report indicates that 82% of young professionals already use AI at work, a 2025 ETS-Harris Poll report reveals a significant “fear of being obsolete” (FOBO) among Gen Z, with 65% experiencing it compared to 60% of all employed adults. Furthermore, 45% of Gen Z job seekers feel their college education is rendered irrelevant by AI advancements. This demographic’s optimism regarding AI is often contingent on stability, with 72% indicating greater excitement if a financial safety net were in place. For enterprise leaders, this means positioning AI not as a replacement for human capability, but as a co-pilot that enhances ethical, creative contributions. Governance policies must ensure AI deployment augments human roles, focusing on elevating complex problem-solving and unique human insight, rather than purely automating tasks.
- Beigeification Versus Identity Rebellion: The drive for algorithmic optimization has inadvertently led to cultural sameness, or “beigeification.” A 2025 Preferred Travel Group-Harris Poll study found 80% of consumers believe Instagram fosters a “copy-and-paste effect” in luxury travel, with 79% feeling high-end experiences have “lost their soul.” Consequently, 72% state they will not pay for luxury accommodations that lack distinctiveness. In response, a “newstalgia” movement emphasizes personal curation and physical proof of experience. A 2025 Tubi-Harris Poll found that 82% of Gen Z enjoy discovering older content, and Harris Poll America This Week Tracker data shows 70% of Gen Z collect physical items and 63% shop secondhand. For brands, this signals a need to move beyond efficiency-driven uniformity. CX strategies should prioritize distinctiveness, celebrating imperfections and inviting customers into the creative or discovery process. This requires robust data analytics to identify authentic customer segments and personalize experiences that feel unique, rather than templated.
- Logic Versus Lottery: Traditional pathways to success—save, study, work hard—are increasingly viewed as unreliable. Inflation, economic inequality, and institutional mistrust have led to a belief that the system is rigged. The Harris Poll America This Week Tracker indicates 81% of Americans now require three backup plans, and 73% of Gen Z and Millennials find traditional financial advice out of touch. In this environment, a new belief system blending faith, intuition, and risk has emerged. For instance, 64% of younger consumers view alternative methods like cryptocurrency, meme stocks, or gambling as the only realistic paths to wealth. A 2025 Rokt-Harris Poll report found 70% of consumers appreciate being surprised by last-minute deals. Brands must recognize that rational messaging alone no longer inspires belief; emotional credibility and a degree of humility in acknowledging market volatility are essential. CX should focus on empathetic communication and offer transparent, flexible solutions that reflect this new reality.
Emerging Behaviors and New Trust Signals
The tensions described above are giving rise to seven critical shifts in consumer behavior, each presenting an opportunity for brands to build trust and relevance. These shifts highlight a desire for authenticity, human connection, and genuine value.
Return to Touch and Tangibility: In a digitally saturated world, physical interaction becomes a luxury and a trust signal. A 2025 Quad-Harris Poll found 79% of Millennials look forward to print catalogs from brands, and 64% of Gen Z keep them for decor. Additionally, 77% of young consumers have planned trips to visit a brand in person, seeking a tangible connection.
- What this means: Retail and product experience teams should re-evaluate physical touchpoints. Consider enhancing tactile experiences in stores, delivering curated physical mailers, or offering product demos that emphasize material quality. For instance, a B2B SaaS company could offer high-quality, branded physical guides for complex software, or a telecom provider could invest in flagship stores that emphasize interactive, sensory product demonstrations.
Free Play and Reprioritizing Boredom: After years of hyper-scheduled lives, consumers are rediscovering the creative potential of unstructured time. Eighty-four percent of children want to escape phones for real-world play, and 81% of adults report needing more time for playfulness.
- What this means: Brands can champion unstructured joy. Consider offering experiences that encourage spontaneity rather than pre-planned engagement. A financial services firm might sponsor local community events focused on creative expression, or a retail brand could host “discovery zones” in stores where customers can interact with products without explicit sales pressure.
Quiet Stability and Seeking Anchors: Ambition fatigue is palpable, with a shift from seeking “unicorns” to “anchors.” A 2025 BBBS-Harris Poll found 76% of young professionals prioritize stability over tech or startup jobs. Among 18-25-year-olds, financial stability (41%), work-life balance (36%), and steady growth (36%) are top job priorities.
- What this means: Brands, particularly in employment branding and B2B contexts, should highlight reliability, long-term value, and sustainable growth. For instance, a B2B SaaS provider might emphasize platform stability and predictable cost structures over “disruptive” innovation, or an HR leader could redesign recruitment messaging to focus on career growth and work-life balance (e.g., clearly stating flexible work policies and development opportunities).
Rise of Blue and Hands-on Pride: Cultural prestige is shifting from white-collar knowledge work to craftsmanship and skilled trades. Seventy-seven percent of Americans believe a plumber has better job security than a product manager. Among Gen Z, 38% believe skilled trades offer the best career opportunities, and 36% see them as a faster, more affordable path to success.
- What this means: Brands can reframe “blue collar” work as aspirational. A healthcare provider might highlight the specialized skills of technicians and nurses, or a home improvement retailer could celebrate DIY culture through expert workshops and content showcasing tangible results. This requires a re-evaluation of marketing narratives to align with the value of tangible, durable work.
Purposefully Weird and Breaking the System: Gen Z’s humor has bypassed algorithms, with 64% of teens more likely to engage with brands posting “completely unhinged content.” Chaos, when intentional, signals humanity.
- What this means: Brands need to cultivate a unique, authentic voice, embracing quirks and contradictions. This is not about being irreverent for its own sake, but demonstrating self-awareness and a willingness to break from homogenized messaging. CX teams can empower agents to use more natural, less scripted language (within guardrails) and marketing teams can experiment with creative that reflects a distinct, human personality.
Levity Gatherings and Collective IRL Experiences: Digital connection is increasingly spilling offline, with 82% of Gen Z and Millennials wanting brands to bring people together spontaneously. Seventy-six percent believe the best social media trends manifest in real life.
- What this means: Brands can facilitate real-world collective experiences. This could involve pop-up events, community meetups, or local activations that foster shared joy and cultural belonging. A retail brand might sponsor local festivals, or a telecom company could host gaming tournaments that encourage in-person interaction, thereby transforming online engagement into tangible community building.
Doers to Directors and AI Co-creation: A new relationship with AI is emerging, defined by command rather than competition. Sixty-three percent of Gen Z believe the future belongs to those who can direct AI, and over half are comfortable letting AI manage everyday choices like flights, events, or shopping (e.g., 58% for airfare, 63% for taxes).
- What this means: Brands should empower customers to leverage AI as a creative collaborator. Design interfaces and services that allow customers to direct AI agents with their preferences and budgets, rather than simply consuming AI-generated outputs. This necessitates robust data readiness, clear consent policies for AI usage, and governance frameworks that ensure customer control and privacy. CX leaders should train teams on how to guide customers in co-creating experiences with AI, moving from reactive support to proactive enablement.
Strategic Imperatives for Reality-Rich Brands
In an environment where trust in traditional institutions has eroded, the poll found over 8 in 10 Americans skeptical of business and political leaders), brands are becoming new cultural narrators. To succeed, brands must be human, flexible, and emotionally intelligent.
Here are six strategic steps for senior leaders to adapt their brand strategy:
Create Human Friction as a Feature:
- What to do: Build purposeful pauses, imperfections, and human cues into customer experiences. This might include a slight delay in a service, a handwritten note, or a moment of anticipation. For example, a luxury e-commerce brand could incorporate a personalized, non-automated message at order confirmation or a financial services onboarding process could include a direct call from a human advisor early in the process (threshold: first 24 hours for accounts over $100k).
- What to avoid: Relentless pursuit of efficiency that strips all human elements, leading to sterile, indistinguishable experiences. Over-automating sensitive customer interactions without fallback human support.
Be More Generous:
- What to do: Implement small acts of “over-delivery” that rebuild trust. This could be a surprise upgrade (e.g., airline seat upgrades for loyal customers based on loyalty tiers), an honest explanation for a service disruption (e.g., telecom proactively communicating outage causes and expected resolution times, offering pro-rated credit), or unexpected delights.
- What to avoid: Focusing solely on transactional value without building emotional capital. Mechanistic loyalty programs that lack genuine surprise or personalization.
Celebrate Productive Mess:
- What to do: Show your process, reveal prototypes, and embrace imperfection as proof of humanity. For instance, a B2B SaaS company could share beta versions of features with a select user group, or a retail brand could involve customers in product design through co-creation workshops.
- What to avoid: Presenting a flawless, artificial image that alienates customers who relate to struggle and growth. Hiding internal challenges from customers.
Be Weird on Purpose:
- What to do: Lean into your brand’s unique quirks, contradictions, and edges. Cultivate a creative signature that is unmistakably yours. This requires defining a clear brand personality and empowering marketing and CX teams to express it authentically across channels.
- What to avoid: Mimicking competitor trends or adopting generic “safe” messaging that leads to brand invisibility. Inconsistent brand voice that confuses customers.
Make Discovery Feel Unalgorithmic:
- What to do: Design marketing, retail, and digital experiences that spark serendipity and unexpected delight. This could involve curated product recommendations that go beyond simple purchase history, or in-store displays that encourage exploration rather than directed buying. For an e-commerce platform, this means implementing recommendation engines that blend explicit preferences with novel, serendipitous suggestions.
- What to avoid: Over-optimizing for predictability, resulting in repetitive, uninspiring customer journeys. Digital experiences that feel entirely prescriptive.
Embrace the Director Shift:
- What to do: Empower customers to direct your brand experience, becoming co-creators rather than passive consumers. Provide tools and interfaces that allow for deep personalization and control over AI-driven interactions, respecting data privacy and consent. For example, a financial services app could allow users to configure AI agents to manage specific investment goals or automate bill payments based on custom rules (with clear audit trails and opt-out options).
- What to avoid: Imposing brand taste or AI capabilities without customer agency. Deploying AI that feels like a replacement for human control, eroding trust.
Summary
The Age of Dissonance demands a fundamental rethinking of brand strategy. Senior marketing and CX leaders must move beyond efficiency and optimization alone, recognizing that authenticity, human connection, and a willingness to embrace imperfection are the new drivers of relevance. By understanding the core tensions, adapting to emerging consumer behaviors, and implementing these strategic imperatives, enterprises can build “reality-rich” brands that not only survive but thrive in a complex, volatile world, ultimately fostering deeper loyalty and measurable business outcomes
Read more: http://theharrispoll.com/
