Ipsos Generations Report 2026: Continuity vs Rupture
Continuity and rupture are pervasive themes throughout this year’s Ipsos Generations Report. Some things don’t change. The youngest generations today continue to attract fevered attention from marketers, sometimes at the expense of potentially more valuable older consumers.
But elsewhere, drastic change is on the horizon. Around the world, populations are beginning to decline. Iin five G7 countries, the number of deaths now outnumbers births. Something profound is now in play. We explore the unavoidable consequences for business.
Browse the Ipsos Generations 2026 Report
Inside this year’s report:
The Consumer Extinction: Global fertility rates have collapsed since the mid-1960s. The number of people being born is now falling rapidly, and population decline is inevitable – the only variable is how long it will take in different parts of the world. Is your brand ready for a world with fewer buyers?
Modern Milestones: Young people today are marrying and having children later in life. At the other end of the population pyramid, older people are living longer than ever. This stretched out timeline is rewriting when people hit traditional milestones and developing new life stages that carry with it changes to how people live, eat, spend and travel.
Whatever Happened to the Millennials? Once the subject of media frenzy, who are the Millennials now they are aged 31-46 and largely usurped in the media by Gen Z and, increasingly, Gen Alpha? Now the world’s median person, we set out how and why to target Millennials.
Generations at Work: The workplace, an environment where all generations interact daily, offers us a unique opportunity to disentangle generational myths and realities. We ask whether different age groups experience work fundamentally differently, or whether what we see is in fact a workforce lifecycle that all generations will progress through as they age.
