Occasion, not age or income, predicts what African beverage consumers buy, Franklin Ozekhome, founder of Pop Culture Varsity, told our Culture & Consumer Trends panel at The New Pour Summit ’26, the event Drinkabl Africa convened in Nairobi on July 25.
Ozekhome used a single household to make the point. The same consumer, on the same income, buys value products one day, premium on a Tuesday, wellness drinks on Saturday, then disappears from the category for two weeks. “The same consumer, the same income bracket,” he said. “I feel occasion now predicts behavior better than whether it’s age or income.”
The claim tracks with our own reporting. An August analysis on this site found beverage choices across the continent are shaped more by occasion and desired outcome than by category, with the market increasingly split by occasion, affordability and purpose rather than by age or income bracket.
Ozekhome traced the shift to a generational change in what a weekend means. For his demographic, he said, weekends used to mean asking the group where they were going and consuming copious amounts of alcohol. That pattern is giving way to intentionality, driven by tighter household budgets and a broader lifestyle shift toward health consciousness.
The shift moves control away from the brand. Companies have spent years building a product first and expecting consumers to adopt the experience the brand designed around it, Ozekhome said. Consumers are now building their own occasions, and brands have to fit into decisions already made rather than dictate them.
That leaves one gap exposed, according to Ozekhome: storytelling. Brands go straight to what consumers say they want without explaining why a specific drink deserves a place in someone’s routine, a failure he called poor “liquid education.”
His co-panelists’ argument echoes why we built the summit in the first place. Co-founder Tosin Balogun told Guardian Nigeria in July that the industry has “no structured storytelling machinery,” the gap The New Pour Summit exists to close. He told the Standard separately that young Africans are “drinking differently rather than simply drinking less,” prioritising value for money and brands that reflect personal values over abstinence.
Our New Pour Report, unveiled at the same summit, lists demographics as just one of ten trends reshaping the industry, alongside the sobriety boom and premiumisation. Whether brands actually rebuild campaign budgets around occasion rather than the age and income brackets Ozekhome says are already outdated is the question we will be tracking into next year’s Summit.
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