Mintel, which works in the area of market intelligence, had earlier this year announced its 2026 Global Consumer Predictions that show where consumers will be heading by 2030 and beyond.
From reinvention at any age, to people’s need of affection in all forms, and the power of genuine emotional connections — the three consumer predictions are:
The New Young: As traditional life stages blur, consumers are redefining what it means to be “young” and how to enjoy it. With fulfillment now sought across a longer, more fluid middle of life, brands must rethink how they innovate to stay relevant.
The Affection Deficit: As interactions become more transactional and distant, brand strategy needs to move beyond visibility and relevance, to focus on emotional connection and cultural meaning.
Anti-Algorithm: As consumers push back against algorithmic influence and seek more human, intuitive experiences, brands must ask deeper questions about how they create value.
Medianews4u.com caught up with Matthew Crabbe, Vice President of Trends, APAC, Mintel
Q. In an environment that is rapidly changing what is the big challenge that brands face as they try to be forward-looking?
We are a witnessing world in which the human environment is changing at unprecedented speed, and we can take the area of technology, and especially AI, as evidence of that.
Duly, we must then acknowledge that the needs and experiences of people inevitably change with that change in environment. We also note, through our predictions, the dramatic changes in human societies themselves, especially with ageing populations.
With both needs and experience changes, brands must be positioning themselves to be altering how they cater to those changing needs and experiences. If they do not, they risk becoming irrelevant. If they foresee the direction of change in these new needs and experiences, then they have the potential to take a lead in satisfying those new needs and expectations ahead of their competitors and thereby ensuring their future potential to remain competitive in the market.
Q. Is India a more challenging market compared to other markets because of the sheer diversity?
Rather than framing it as “more challenging,” I’d say India is a uniquely dynamic and diverse market. Its cultural, regional, and socioeconomic variety means that consumer behaviours can differ markedly across segments.
For brands, that represents both an opportunity and a responsibility—to listen closely to consumers and ensure relevance. At Mintel, we focus on understanding these nuances so that our insights genuinely reflect the richness of the Indian market.
Q. What are Mintel’s goals for India?
As a company, our aim is to be our clients’ predictive intelligence partner in helping them better understand the evolving consumer demand, market growth, and innovation strategy, within the context of local market developments as well as regional and global influences.
We support FMCG brands to innovate with strong local relevance while staying ahead in a fast-moving market: whether that means elevating regionally significant ingredients and flavours, or adapting beauty and personal care rituals for Indian consumers.
We’re proud to have local CPG experts who combine deep category knowledge with on-the-ground understanding. That expertise enables us to give brands actionable recommendations grounded in Indian consumer realities.
Q. Could you talk about work recently done by Mintel in the country in areas like FMCG, food and drink, education?
We work with some of the country’s leading FMCG brands and a core part of our offering is our Indian Consumer Research, which offers a robust and nuanced view of the consumer landscape, emerging trends, and whitespace opportunities for innovation. Our research is based on a representative sample of 3,000 consumers across metro and Tier 1-3 cities, covering all four major regions in India.
Additionally, our research is conducted in six local languages to ensure that the insights reflect authentic consumer voices and can be relied on for confident decision-making for brands we work with.
In addition, Mintel Global New Products Database (GNPD) plays a central role in our work with our clients in India. GNPD tracks product innovation and launches across categories, providing them with comprehensive data on new product trends, ingredient and flavour developments, packaging innovations, and market gaps. By leveraging GNPD data alongside our consumer research, we help clients identify opportunities that address consumer needs.
Q. Are successful brands the ones that create a culture in which people feel empowered to share knowledge, generate ideas and instigate change as opposed to brands that focus on a traditional hierarchy?
All people, throughout the ages, have wanted agency – to gain and share knowledge, generate new ideas that create fulfilling work for them and offer the opportunities to create positive change. That is progress. The so-called traditional hierarchy is what tends to stymie progress for a lot of people and is often an idea that is not really true.
Q. What role is AI playing in enabling Mintel improve its offerings?
Innovation is becoming more complex as brands navigate economic uncertainty, geopolitical shifts and rapidly evolving consumer expectations. To support our clients in this environment, Mintel has embraced AI to make our predictive intelligence even more powerful and actionable through our new products, Mintel Leap and Mintel Spark.
Mintel Leap is a closed-loop generative AI platform powered by Mintel’s trusted research and expert insights. It delivers fast and reliable answers to strategic questions about people, products and categories, helping brands make innovation and marketing decisions with greater speed and confidence.
Mintel Spark complements this by ‘sparking’ the creative side of innovation. It helps brands turn insights into new product ideas by generating AI-powered visual mock-ups so they can see what a product or packaging might look like and refine it as they go. And, just like Leap, every output is rooted in Mintel’s verified research and expert analysis.
Together, these tools help brands feel confident that their ideas aren’t just new; they’re backed by real consumer insight and understanding.
Q. Does Mintel do a lot of work with media and entertainment companies like broadcasters?
Mintel’s core specialisation is within the FMCG industry, where we serve as a predictive market intelligence partner for brands. With more than five decades of robust data and market expertise, we combine human analysis with data and advanced technology to identify patterns and anticipate future consumer behaviour.
While our primary focus is FMCG, media and entertainment companies in India can benefit from our insights to better understand consumer lifestyle shifts, category adjacencies, and how broader cultural trends influence audience needs and expectations.
Q. Mintel’s report noted that consumers are pushing back against algorithmic influence. Will they also push back against AI at some point?
To some degree, there is already suspicion of what AI is being used for, and how it especially might replace people in the workplace, or take over aspects of our lives.
That there hasn’t been more push-back yet it probably due to lack of understanding of what AI can do already among the wider population. Even AI experts say they don’t really understand how it actually works and what it can potentially do.
Q. The report notes that in India brands like The Whole Truth in India are stepping away from social media to escape algorithm fatigue and returning with initiatives that prioritise meaningful engagement. What further moves do you see taking place in this regard?
Building direct engagement with people makes brands more genuine in the eyes of consumers. That engagement can be augmented by digital media, so as to build a two-way relationship with the consumer audience, and can indeed be used to make that engagement more innovative and impactful.
The danger has always been that brands rely too much on the algorithm (or, arguably, influencers) for the sake of convenience, but thereby become seen as ingenuine. What we should see is brands using more different and innovative ways of engaging with consumers to build a lasting relationship of trust.
Q. The Mintel report has noted that brands must rethink how they innovate to stay relevant. Is this what makes companies like Apple, Netflix unique? The ability to rethink at lightening speed.
Rethinking how to innovate to stay relevant is a reality as old as the history of companies and corporations. As the rate of change in the consumer environment speeds up, so must, naturally, the pace of innovation.
The further out brands can see the changes in consumer need and behaviour, the better able they will be to innovate in a timely way. Brands of the past, even ones known for being quick to innovate, can very easily be overtaken and made irrelevant by more nimble, smaller competitors.
Q. Geopolitical tension is changing the context in which brands operate. Are things like US President Donald Trump’s tariffs creating layers of difficulty for brands?
Geopolitics and the breakdown of globalisation are just two aspects making predicting the future operating environment more difficult for brands. Other aspects adding to the uncertainty include climate change, depopulation, population ageing, income and asset inequality, property market inflation, ballooning debt, etc.
The future is much less certain than it has been for decades, and that uncertainty will not only pose difficulties for brands, but also creates insecurities for consumers, which in turn affects their behaviours, which then become more unpredictable for brands.
Q. The report noted that brand strategy needs to move beyond visibility and relevance, to focus on emotional connection and cultural meaning. What tactics work in achieving this in a cluttered environment where consumers are inundated with media content?
Going back to a genuine human need and supplying a product or service that serves that need better than any other in the market, with efficacy proven with data that has been independently assessed, and without hyperbole. Simplicity will become an increasingly important means to build trust, and through trust, loyalty.
Q. In India there is a greater focus by companies on the fact that marketing must be linked to business outcomes. Is this also being seen in other markets? Are vanity metrics declining in importance rapidly?
Vanity metrics are the very antithesis of what is needed, as described in the answer to the question immediately above.
Q. The report noted that brands must focus on the middle as opposed just on Gen Z or on older people. In India how big is the middle opportunity?
The key point we highlighted in the report is that brands shouldn’t focus exclusively on any single group—whether youth, the elderly, or the growing middle. The youth after all, are the middle group of the future, just as today’s middle group will become tomorrow’s older population.
Society is changing and brands need to understand how people’s needs and experiences change throughout life, and there are opportunities for brands at every stage of that journey.
