A new divorce era is coming for brands

I should start by saying I’m not a fan of weddings.

Thick embossed ply landing though my letterbox with all the charm of a parking ticket or a bailiff’s letter. Demanding colour schemes that require shopping trips for items I have no desire to own. WhatsApp threads bullying me into Stag Dos and Hen Dos (the worst part of progressive society means I can now be railroaded into both) and then let’s not get started on ‘destination weddings’ — a phrase which to me has always sounded more like a threat, than an invitation.

But I do have sympathy with all the political hysteria around falling marriage rates. Not from a moral perspective, but from an economic one. When marriage rates go up, more people feel secure enough to have babies, have babies earlier, and have more of them. And that’s important to avoid an ageing society, with a workforce saddled with spiralling costs. The marriage rate for twentysomethings has collapsed by 90 per cent and male pensioners are now more likely to get married than men in their twenties. I predict massive marriage incentives from whichever government comes next, regardless of their place of the ‘traditional values’ spectrum.

When I was digging into all the marriage data, I stumbled across the latest divorce data which is less reported on, but tells an interesting story. Divorce rates are not going up. In fact, they are beginning to significantly decline.  The ten-year-in divorce rate peaked for couples who tied the knot in 1995 at 24.5 per cent. But it has been going down since then. Couples who married in 2013, now have a lower ten-year-in divorce rate than couples who married in 1975.

Some argue that the initial explosion in divorces came from growing social acceptability but I’m not so sure. People didn’t only start getting divorced because they felt more empowered to do it socially. The thing that really changed was that it became technically easier. Divorce rates exploded from the early seventies after the Divorce Reform Act of 1969 which allowed divorce after separation for two years if both parties agreed, and five years even if both parties did not agree. Divorce (thankfully) became fundamentally more possible, and more available to all.

People who got married post millennium tended to get married when they were a bit older, and perhaps with a bit more life experience and a bit more selectivity. And so, the ease of divorce has not had the same level of impact on their ten-year marriage survival rate as it did for previous generations. When we look at marriage rates overall, not just the ten-year-in marriage rates, we see the same story. Ease of divorce drove divorce rates to a peak and now those rates have declined and settled because the bottleneck of people waiting for divorce to just become simpler has passed.

So what’s all this got to do with brands? Well, quite a lot actually. We talk a great deal about relationships, loyalty, and switching in our world of brands and marketing, and there’s a lot that we can learn from the above data trends that is not just metaphorical.

Many brands have tried to retain their customers by making it complex for them to leave. This is true in Telco where for the last decade providers were on a mission of bundling (no matter whether it was truly profitable or not) in order to have customers so locked in that it felt like too much of a hassle to switch. But like the Divorce Reform Act, there does tend to be a legislative correction that comes along eventually when industries create artificial inertia. In the UK, Ofcom’s new OTS service enabling simplified switching has driven 1.6 million brits to change their provider in just one year. 

In digital services, platforms, and apps, driving subscriptions that are forgotten about, or are too much of a headache to get rid of, has also become a less than honourable objective. This gravy train will be coming to an end in 2027 when new laws from The Department for Business and Trade come into force. Subscriptions will have to be as easy to cancel as they are to set up (e.g. one click), and the onus will be on companies to inform consumers up front when discounted periods are coming to an end, or contracts are about to be renewed. Cooling-off periods will even protect consumers further who forget to cancel after free trial periods finish.  In short, businesses can no longer behave like marriages in the 1960s. Because it will be easier than ever to walk out the door.

These are good changes that should be welcomed, not just for consumers but ultimately for businesses and brands too. Because if you want a marriage to last, and last well, with both of you investing in it, it’s not really a good idea to rely on it being too much of a hassle for one of you to leave. And you can’t build value by hoping your customers don’t notice that they are paying for you. It’s always better in the long term to focus efforts on creating experiences where people choose to stay, and perhaps, like some successful modern marriages… even invite others to join the party.

Matt Waksman is head of strategy at Droga5 London