How can Morning Brew monetize sponsored research?
A quantitative investigation of Americans’ mindsets toward personal finance and investing.
Project Overview
Morning Brew came to Gradient with a critical strategy question:
“How can we demonstrate to financial advertisers the value of Morning Brew’s audience?”
Our research approach answers this question with three additional goals:
1. Generate proof points for Morning Brew’s advertising partners. Morning Brew wants to validate their audience and products as attractive to finance and investment sector ad partners.
2. Produce newsletter content. Morning Brew wants to leverage our results into stories for their daily newsletter (you know, the one with 4 million subscribers).
3. Iterate on the process. Another goal of the project is to prototype a new process for the Morning Brew team to use primary research for their newsletters’ editorial purposes.
- Segmentation Analysis
- Morning Brew Audience
- Investment Likelihood
Through a segmentation analysis, Gradient identified six discrete mindsets toward investing and personal finance among American adults. We also applied the segmentation to Morning Brew’s audience.
These mindsets differentiate along 5 key dimensions, which reveal distinct vulnerabilities and perspectives to inform MB’s content
- Morning Brew is the channel to reach financially savvy investors, as nearly all MB subscribers are investors, compared to only 63% of American adults.
- Morning Brew subscribers are also more likely to begin investing earlier than the general public.
- Morning Brew subscribers contain more than twice as many high net-worth individuals (HNWI) than the general population (8%).
- The Morning Brew sample is generally more financially educated than the American public, thanks to learning about investments from financial newsletters (56% vs 18%).
Compared to the general public, Morning Brew subscribers are far more likely to invest and invest more
Research Approach
Survey Development
Working closely with the Morning Brew team, Gradient developed a survey containing a 48 mindset question battery designed to surface underlying values toward investing and personal finance, and a module of questions meant to understand the landscape of American investing.
Administer Survey
We fielded a digital survey to two populations: a nationally representative sample of 1,518 American adults and a sample of 1,017 Morning Brew subscribers. Subscribers were sampled via the Brew’s Insights Panel and a newsletter invitation. Fielding took place between March 27th and April 10th, 2024.
Segmentation Analysis
We ran a non-negative matrix factorization (NMF) analysis on the 48 mindset questions. Results were evaluated for statistical and practical viability. We applied the same model to the Morning Brew subscribers.
Brand Equity Analysis
To help Morning Brew make the case for their audience’s awareness and perception of financial and investment brands, we created a brand funnel for the biggest names in the industry.
