Consumer behaviour does not change suddenly. It changes gradually, and only becomes evident in retrospect. Our advantage as analysts is that patterns consolidate before the market interprets them. The data sees them first.

This analysis draws on patterns identified across more than forty campaigns executed during 2024 in the consumer goods, services, and retail sectors. It is not a forecast. It is a reading of signals that are already present.

Attention as a scarce asset

The most consistent data point throughout 2024 was the continued decline in brand communication open rates across all channels. Email, push notifications, direct messages on social platforms: the consumer opens less, clicks less, tolerates less interruption.

It is not that the consumer is more sceptical than before. It is that their irrelevance threshold is lower. If the message is not relevant within the first few seconds, it disappears.

What this means for 2025: segmentation will cease to be a competitive advantage and become the price of entry. Brands that do not personalise will not fail dramatically. They will simply stop being seen.

The return of deliberate purchasing

In high-ticket categories, we observed in 2024 a lengthening of the decision cycle. The consumer who in 2022 would purchase an appliance or a trip with two or three prior interactions, in 2024 required between six and nine before deciding.

The hypothesis is economic: when perceived uncertainty is high, significant spending decisions slow down and become better informed. The consumer searches more comparisons, reads more reviews, cross-references more sources.

For brands, this has a direct implication: long-form informative content regains value. Not entertainment content. Content that helps make better decisions: comparatives, guides, product analyses. Brands that invested in that type of content in 2024 observed significant improvements in their conversion rate at the bottom of the funnel.

Loyalty as behaviour, not feeling

One of the most relevant findings from our analyses was the dissociation between what consumers say about their favourite brands and what they do when facing a real purchase decision.

In brand equity surveys, established brands continue to receive high scores on stated preference. In transaction data, that preference frequently evaporated in the face of a price offer or a more convenient purchase experience.

Real loyalty is not an emotional state. It is a repeated behaviour under comparable conditions. And that behaviour, in 2024, proved more fragile than traditional brand indicators suggested.

For 2025, brands that rely on their historical equity without reinforcing it with tangible value in every interaction will see their recurring customer share erode faster than expected.

Channels: what grew and what stalled

In terms of acquisition efficiency, 2024 consolidated a hierarchy worth paying attention to.

Email marketing, properly segmented and with relevant content, continued to be the channel with the best investment-to-return ratio across virtually all categories we analysed. Brands that abandoned it in favour of paid platforms are reconsidering.

Paid search maintained its efficiency at high intent, but cost per click continued its upward trend in all competitive categories. Without a complementary organic content strategy, the acquisition cost via paid search will continue increasing in 2025.

Social media, measured by real incremental contribution to business, showed more heterogeneous results than the sector's usual optimism acknowledges.

The overall reading

The 2025 consumer is not radically different from the 2024 consumer. But they are more demanding about relevance, more deliberate in high-value decisions, and more volatile in their loyalty behaviour than traditional brand models anticipate.

The data was already saying so. The question is who was reading it.