What post-festive consumer behaviour means for retention

The 2025 festive season in India revealed a shift in consumer behaviour: purchase decisions were no longer triggered by sale banners, but formed weeks earlier through social feeds, conversations, and everyday rituals. According to Consumr.ai's TwinSights Festive Report 2025, brands relying on traditional indicators like search surges or marketplace offers were already too late to capture consumer intent.

“Preference for personalisation and utility, and planning around offers were manifested differently by sector but consistently shaped product design, promotion timing and fulfilment promises,” explains Vivek Bhargava, Co-Founder of Consumr.ai. This shift pushed brands in categories like gifting, consumer electronics, and beauty to ramp up influencer and discovery-led content well ahead of time.

This year, consumers began researching and interacting with brands much earlier, often through AI assistants and answer engines rather than waiting for Google search spikes. Bhargava notes that users started asking conversational queries like "What are the best gifts under ₹1000 that feel personal?" weeks before the actual festive rush.

This early intent formation played out differently across sectors. According to Bhargava, consumer packaged goods noticed that routine gift boxes underperform while personalised assortments with premium finishes drove earlier purchases. “Brands moved to modular hampers and creator-led social activations,” he continues.

The consumer durables and tech segment saw sellers leading with proof of utility, such as "saves ₹X/month," along with installation and warranty bundles rather than feature spectacle. Shoppers used price alerts and comparison workflows before making purchases.

On the other hand, the beauty industry witnessed a shift from one-off glam hampers to everyday ritual kits, with transparent ingredient storytelling taking precedence over influencer hype. Interestingly, in health and wellness, “smaller, ritual-oriented sets and refillable/sustainable formats outperformed oversized hampers; gifting became “meaningful ritual” rather than volume,” Bhargava notes.

The BFSI sector behaved like infrastructure, with no-cost EMIs and instant approvals surfacing earlier in consumer journeys, and banks that embedded finance during discovery rather than just at checkout converted better.

Discovery moves to social feeds

One of the most significant shifts this festive season was how consumers discovered products. Bhargava shared that consumers are buying products after discovering them on Instagram, often purchasing them as soon as they learn about them.

He emphasises that earlier, consumers would identify a need and search for it, with the trigger to buy based on search patterns. Now, “Consumers are discovering things through social media, influencers, and content creators, which then leads to search.” 

Bhargava comments that brands need to be present at the intent-seeding moment, triggering the search by creating awareness rather than waiting for consumers to come looking.

Personalisation trumps price sensitivity

Perhaps the most revealing insight from the 2025 festive season was that personalisation outweighed price as a purchase motivator. The AI Twin simulations repeatedly showed that consumers sought emotional or identity-based resonance over discounts. Bhargava shares that people wanted to gift items that make the receiver think of them every day.

"Custom messages, mix-and-match hampers and premium finishes created stronger memory and willingness to pay than larger blanket discounts," Bhargava observes. This trend extended across categories. 

In durables, tailored bundles with right-sized models, installation, and warranty beat the cheapest options, as buyers paid for reduced friction and fitted solutions. Beauty and wellness saw curated ritual kits and ingredient clarity outperform low-price mass hampers, while in BFSI, personalised EMI plans and context-framed messaging converted better than generic APR pitches.

Bhargava points to Kapiva's repositioning around "metabolic health" rather than "diabetes" as an example of brands communicating personal relevance and expanding their market beyond price-driven competition.

Regional patterns and post-festive retention

Geographies are also revealing distinct patterns in how Indians discover, evaluate, and finance products.

Metros led in absolute big-ticket spending and advanced planning, with consumers quicker to adopt instant finance and complex bundles. 

“Tier-II/smaller towns are also rapidly catching up in digital discovery (marketplace + social feeds) and becoming more sophisticated about deals/EMIs, but still valued offline reassurance (touch, local stock, last-mile certainty), ” says Bhargava and continues, “However, rural/semi-urban areas are slower on big-ticket buys but selective adoption of ritualised wellness and practical bundles; delivery confidence and localised assortments mattered more.”

While the festive season has concluded as of now, Bhargava explains that post-festive consumer sentiment is being characterised by mindful satisfaction rather than post-spree fatigue, with consumers deriving pride from control and value realisation.

The TwinSights report frames this as "festive sales are the start of memory, not the end of a funnel." 

“Brands that offer tutorials, installation tips, and aftercare touchpoints saw deeper post-purchase satisfaction and advocacy. Brands offering subscription gifting and refillable products keep buyers connected for months.”

Moreover, AI Twins simulations showed that micro-moment extensions (e.g., “monthly ritual kits”) helped spread festive attachment through the year.

Looking ahead, Bhargava emphasises the need for agility in understanding and responding to consumer behaviour. "The consumer is evolving much faster than what they used to evolve earlier. Brands have to keep up and make sure that they're constantly changing their product, their value, their communication, their positioning, very closely to how the consumer is changing," he says.

He notes that while brands previously made one large creative decision that would stay relevant for years, today they need to make 20 smaller decisions throughout the year. 

Traditional research methods cannot keep pace with this velocity. The shift from price wars to value creation, from discounts to loyalty systems, and from reactive analysis to real-time intelligence will define success in the 2026 festive cycle. As consumer expectations continue to evolve around sustainability, personalisation, and purposeful spending, brands must move from anticipating intent to actively shaping it.