Prince Harry cut down the booze. George Clooney sold his motorbike. Kate Middleton became a rugby patron. In the novel “Middlemarch,” Dorothea Brooke dedicates herself to becoming a research assistant for her first wife Casaubon, before supporting her second husband Will’s reformist parliamentary career.
Real life and fiction have long captured the changes that men and women go through as they enter marriage. They pool their resources, take on each other’s interests, become an “us” as much as a “me”.
For marketers, this is a critical but often overlooked time, when the mutual influence and changed circumstances between two people creates new customers, brand-changing habits, and all sorts in between.
How can we investigate this? We can create two audiences - 25-44 year olds in the UK, without children, and controlling for ethnicity. The only thing we change is relationship status, then look at where exactly those two groups are most different - letting us see exactly which changes come from a ring on the finger.
We’ve dug into our data to best nail down the biggest and most meaningful changes that men and women go through - here’s what we found.
Even though our audiences didn’t have children, becoming married at least increases the thought of having kids, with men becoming more likely to plan to have one, and more likely to talk about parenting online.
As famous redeemed party boys like Prince Harry would suggest, alcohol consumption tends to go down, with a notable drop in whiskey consumption too.
At the same time, men become more health-conscious. That old meme of women persuading their spouse to go for a checkup has quite a bit of truth to it. Men also become more excited about personalized medicine (the one piece of technology women tend to be more interested in), and more likely to say they live with someone - often their spouse - who has a health condition.
Despite this, some personal care purchases go down, perhaps due to feeling less of a need to impress. Men get less interested in skincare and fashion, and become less likely to buy anti-aging cream.
On the flipside, married men become consumers of products that are typically marketed to women like makeup and sanitary products - even as they become less interested in cosmetics themselves. These markets do have a segment of the likely confused husband.
The female influence also comes through as they get more likely to follow the FIFA Women’s World Cup. On the other hand, marriage does create some golf widows, as men become more interested in hacking their way around 18 holes. They become less likely to play snooker or pool, though - perhaps a byproduct of spending less time in bars.
While new habits emerge, some are dealt a hammer blow. Men become less interested in gambling, and research in Norway has suggested that marital status is a protective factor against gambling disorder. Their gaming habits also change quite substantially. They play fewer massively multiplayer online games (MMOs), and become less likely to talk about gaming online.
A lot of change comes as men and women pool their resources together. Men become more likely to get a credit card, to use price comparison tools, and to want brands to be eco-friendly. As they become loyal to their spouse, they also become more loyal to brands.
Once they’ve exchanged vows, men trade bar tabs for grocery runs, start looking for joint credit deals, and spend less time in the male beauty aisle. For any brand with the 25-44 male demographic in their sights, it’s important to know just how much their behavior can change after their wedding.
Women experience a lot of the same changes that men do when they get married, as their life priorities intertwine with their partner's. But in some cases, women’s behavior changes in the opposite direction to men’s.
For one thing, they get much more into the NBA and F1 (or perhaps that’s down to the eye candy of the drivers). And while their husbands might be spending more time on the golf course, that actually makes women more likely to follow the sport.
Interesting changes come in their alcohol consumption too. As other research has found, while men’s alcohol consumption drops, women’s increases. And as for specific drinks - women become more partial to whiskey and Guinness, though they tend to drop the gin and the tequila.
As with men, you see habits change that signal a reduced need to impress the other sex. They become less likely to buy hair styling products, to self-tan, and they feel less fashion-conscious in general.
Building deeper bonds with men - who are much more interested in technology on the whole - brings on an interest in tech for women. They get more excited about AI and robotics (even as men’s interest for the latter decreases), and more likely to own a VR headset, to buy electric cars, and to use Beats by Dre products. They even get more into sci-fi movies.
The other area with distinct behavioral changes is personal finance. Post-nuptials, women become more likely to invest in crypto, and more interested in personal finance in general.
Once a partner is secured, married women buy less makeup, though they do use more lip gloss.
Once they tie the knot, women become less likely to listen to advice podcasts. Intriguingly, women also become less likely to use Wikipedia after marriage - perhaps their partners become a new outsourced source of knowledge.
In terms of buying for the man in their life, one of the more significant changes is increased propensity for buying wristwatches. They become more likely to shop at Victoria’s Secret too. And appropriately enough, once women get the ring on their finger, they become less likely to buy jewelry themselves.
Marriage isn’t just a demographic label, it’s a behavioral reboot. Not just because two people become more of a buying unit, but because the deep relationship - the deepest many people will ever have - lets each spouse take interests and influences from the other, putting them into audiences they’d otherwise not be part of. Whether it’s wives feeling the urge to try their husband’s favorite whiskey, or husbands nervously Googling which color sanitary-pad pack to grab on the way home, brands that crack the marital code can win loyalty that lasts beyond the honeymoon.