Marketers Need to Address Evolving Lifestyles as Consumers Age

Tuesday 15 January 2013, Amsterdam

The stereotypical perception of Soft Drinks consumers is that they have a younger profile; however, Older Consumers’ volume share of global consumption is almost 2 percentage points higher than their share of the population, which shows that Older Consumers are less drawn to Alcoholic Drinks and Hot Drinks than imagined.

“Value for money” is important to Older Consumers, while “quality” ranks lower among Older Consumers than overall, which makes Older Consumers the most important drinkers of private label products.

Although often categorized together, consumers in each of the BRIC markets have very different tastes and characteristics; low per capita beverage consumption is probably the main factor that they have in common. For instance, Brazil is the most developed beverage market within BRIC and has consumer consumption patterns more closely aligned to the Non-BRIC region than anywhere else.

Defying the stereotype, the survey found that Older Consumers, those aged 55 and over, punch above their weight in Soft Drinks markets. Shrewd marketers can take advantage of this by assessing how they can better exploit the product vacuum for Older Consumers.

Whereas the Hot Drinks consumption of men and women is very similar, in the overall Soft Drinks market there is a small swing in favor of men. This can be accredited to China, where Chinese women make up 48% of the survey and just 44% of the consumption. If China is discounted, the balance swings in favor of female consumption.

Marketers need to address evolving lifestyles as consumers age. This is not just with regard to product but also to packaging and marketing. In the UK for instance, the expansion of access to higher education and social trends delays the age at which people tend to settle down and start families, which has created an important consumer  group within the Early Young Adults, and even Older Young Adults, age group whose lifestyles more closely resemble a “youth” market than those of Early Young Adults twenty or thirty years ago.