What if a “brand switcher” is actually two people in the same house making compl
By James C Jackson · October 2, 2026 · Curated by George's Blog
What if a “brand switcher” is actually two people in the same house making completely different choices?
Say a household has historically bought Oatly.
Then MALK Organics starts showing up in the basket and purchases of Oatly begin to decline.
At the household level, it might look like the household is switching brands.
But what if only one person switched?
Maybe one person started buying MALK while someone else in the same house never stopped buying Oatly.
Oatly is still being purchased — just less often, in fewer units or on a longer purchase cycle because one of the consumers in the household changed.
That’s a very different consumer story.
And it made me start wondering how often we look at household behavior and treat it as if the household is one consumer.
This becomes especially interesting for retailers like Walmart, Target and CVS Pharmacy, where enormous first-party data ecosystems already support personalization, promotions and targeting.
If more of that household behavior can be understood at the individual level, there may be an opportunity to make those decisions even more relevant.
The reason I started thinking more seriously about this was because of some interesting research I came across this week.
A 2026 study published in Scientific Reports, part of Springer Nature, analyzed American Time Use Survey data from more than 234,000 U.S. adults and found that 26% ate all of their meals alone on the previous day — more than 50% higher than in 2003.
Even among people who LIVE with other people, eating alone has increased significantly.
Hartman Group is seeing something similar in its Meals 2026 work: households increasingly operate less like one eating unit and more like individuals fitting meals around their own work, school, exercise and social schedules.
People can share an address without sharing the same food life.
And that potentially changes how we interpret loyalty, promotion response, targeting, segmentation, assortment and even who we think a brand is really competing with.
Household data is still incredibly useful. Plenty of purchases really are household decisions.
But the more individualized behavior becomes inside households, the more careful we may need to be about assuming the household itself represents one consumer.