麦肯锡-2025年消费者状况：当中断成为永久性的（英）

June 2025Retail and Consumer Packaged Goods PracticesState of the Consumer 2025: When disruption becomes permanentFive years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers’ crisis-era habits have lingered. Here’s what organizations can do in the new environment to outcompete in the second half of the decade.This article is a collaborative effort by Becca Coggins, Christina Adams, and Kari Alldredge, with Alyssa Hopcus, Justin Shamoun, and Laura Bucklin, representing views from McKinsey’s Retail and Consumer Package Goods Practices.At the start of the decade, consumers adopted a slew of new behaviors—almost overnight—in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Remote work, digital connectivity, and solo activities became the norm for life in lockdown. Today, the world has reopened, but the era of uncertainty and its impact on consumers linger. Globally, consumer sentiment is still poorer on average than it was at the beginning of 2020, and consumers remain concerned about rising prices and inflation. Despite this persistent uncertainty, they keep spending. In fact, the relationship between sentiment and spending has weakened. Meanwhile, consumers’ expectations for value and convenience have them making unexpected trade-offs across categories: trading down in one place while simultaneously splurging on something else. These choices may be confusing to anyone trying to predict what consumers will do next. It’s not that today’s consumers are irrational; it’s that the old frameworks used to decipher their behavior no longer apply. What once seemed like short-term adaptations born of the COVID-19 pandemic have solidified into lasting behavioral change. As the world heads into the second half of the decade, consumer-facing companies confront new challenges, but knowing how to decipher an unpredictable consumer can help them stay agile and relevant. From an analysis of the McKinsey ConsumerWise Sentiment Survey and State of the Consumer Market Survey data, we have identified five behavioral forces that will shape the sector in the years ahead and four strategic imperatives to position organizations for growth.1 (While growth in emerging markets and global demographic shifts, such as an aging global population and lower average birth rates, are also reshaping the consumer landscape, this article focuses on the sticky consumer behavioral changes that we see affecting the world’s largest markets.) Five COVID-19-era dynamics that are still shaping the consumer sectorAt the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers adopted new behaviors extremely quickly, and some of those behaviors have endured. To understand how consumers have changed, McKinsey ConsumerWise Sentiment Survey questioned more than 25,000 consumers in 18 markets that together account for around 75 percent of global GDP.2 Their answers, as well as those of participants in the State of the Consumer Market Survey, reveal how today’s consumers spend their time, who they trust, and how they ascr