Welcome to The Aging Consumer
How aging changes consumer decisions, category behaviour, and market opportunity.
Age Is Not a Consumer Segment. It Is a Market Condition.
People are living longer, but most consumer strategy still assumes a younger customer than the market actually has.
That affects how brands define growth, how retailers design categories, how researchers interpret loyalty, and how products are packaged, promoted, and sold.
Age changes how people search, compare options, manage effort, assess risk, and recover from mistakes. These changes do not suddenly begin at 65. They accumulate across adulthood and alter what consumers need from products, services, and retail environments.
Yet age is still commonly treated as a specialist segment. Older consumers are grouped into a single category, generational labels stand in for analysis, and behavior that looks like loyalty or resistance is rarely examined closely enough.
The Aging Consumer examines how consumer behavior changes with age, where markets misread those changes, and what commercial teams should do differently.
I write about questions such as:
Why do familiar buying patterns not always indicate stronger loyalty?
When does friction get mistaken for lack of interest?
What do age, life stage, and cohort each explain?
Why can one-off surveys misrepresent how behavior changes over time?
Where do packaging, retail design, and communication create avoidable effort?
I am Linda van Rijn, PhD. My work combines longitudinal consumer research with twenty+ years of experience across FMCG, food retail, consumer panels, strategy, and commercial performance.
This publication is written for brand leaders, category managers, retailers, strategists, and consumer insight professionals who want a more accurate view of aging consumers and a clearer sense of what to do with it.
Start here
Generations Give You Stories. Age Gives You Strategy.
Why generational labels often conceal the differences that matter for consumer strategy.
The Loyalty Myth: Why Brands Misread Older Shoppers
Why familiar shopping behavior should not automatically be interpreted as loyalty.
The Packaging Failure Nobody Logs
How packaging friction disappears from the measures most companies use.
We All Know Populations Are Aging. That Is the Problem
Why marketers keep treating population aging as a future trend, even though older shoppers already generate most grocery value.
Subscribe for monthly analysis on aging, consumer behavior, and market strategy.
Linda