What’s trending in white goods? Durable, efficient, and affordable

Globally, the share of consumers waiting ten years or more to replace their products increased from 35 percent in 2023 to 39 percent in 2024. This trend will continue to affect the already reduced volume development in white goods. But replacement frequency varies by region. For example, the percentage of consumers who replace their products in five or fewer years is higher than the global average in Poland, Türkiye, and the United Kingdom and lower than the global average in France, Germany, Japan, and Sweden.

Affordability and ease of use are consumers’ top priorities when purchasing appliances, reflecting their highly cost-conscious and practical mindset. Brand trustworthiness follows closely as a top-three selection consideration, signaling that perceived reliability remains essential to generating sales. In contrast, features such as design aesthetics, connected solutions, smart functionality, and sustainability rank lower in importance.

While consumers’ perceived importance of the top three product-selection considerations remained stable from 2023 to 2024, specific features rose slightly in importance while brand sustainability and design aesthetics fell slightly.

The product features consumers consider most important—some important enough to pay a significant premium for—relate closely to how they rank brand selection criteria. Consumers who consider affordability and trustworthiness in brands, for example, are willing to pay a 30 to 40 percent premium for long-lasting products (55 percent of consumers) and the highest available water and energy efficiency (44 percent of consumers).

Notably, while consumers overall did not indicate a willingness to pay a premium for locally made products, the survey indicated that there is interest in local products among consumers in higher-income demographics who prefer premium brands.

In response to consumers’ increased focus on affordability, efficiency, durability, and reliability, manufacturers are reviewing their product cost structures as well as their portfolios and business model complexity. Consumers’ product priorities also indicate a strategic opportunity for manufacturers to center their marketing and communications on the features that consumers value so much they are willing to pay a premium for them.

Connectivity has not lived up to the transformative impact many OEMs have anticipated, proving to be more of a technology push than a consumer pull. While it may well become more important to purchasing decisions—especially among younger generations, whose interest is the strongest—connectivity will likely be less important in the near term than previously assumed as consumers become accustomed to features and as value-adding use cases are still being developed. Consumers who purchase higher-price-point models expect those models to include the connectivity features that add the highest value. Ensuring that premium-brand consumers’ expectations for connectivity are met is more important than ever now that some players (especially brands in Asian markets) are adding connectivity features to lower-price-point models. Nonetheless, players should be wary of adopting connectivity features across their full portfolios to avoid overpricing the overall market.

Consumer views on connectivity features vary when survey data is broken down by age demographic. Specifically, in 2024, Gen Z and millennial respondents rated the importance of automatic programming and tailored offerings to future purchasing decisions nine to 12 percentage points higher than the global average, while Gen X respondents ranked them slightly above the global average. Thus, the 5 to 9 percent decline in the global average importance of those connectivity features to consumers’ future purchasing decisions can be attributed largely, if not entirely, to the sentiments of baby boomer respondents, whose rankings were between ten and 11 percentage points below the global average.

Opportunities for brands, then, lie not only in differentiating themselves from peers by boosting interest in connectivity with more features that consumers believe add value but also in gaining ground among younger consumers with leading-edge use cases that keep pace with evolving tech and expectations.

White goods OEMs have not yet been able to crack the code for direct-to-consumer (D2C) and online sales. While 30 percent of consumers research products on OEM websites prior to purchase, only 20 percent complete their purchases online, and only 1 percent of total sales take place via brands’ own sites. There are notable regional differences in the share of online purchases, which range from 25 to 36 percent for consumers from Germany, Poland, and the United Kingdom to 11 to 20 percent for consumers in France, Italy, Japan, Sweden, Türkiye, and the United States.

While major appliances will remain a retail game, it is important for manufacturers to build D2C channels to gain consumer insights. Such insights inform future developments and not only allow manufacturers to connect with consumers about their brands and products but also help them build loyalty and shape purchasing decisions. When developing a D2C strategy, OEMs are often faced with the question of how to balance maintaining strong retail partnerships with capturing higher margins.

When it comes to meeting consumer demand for aftermarket services, brands may be falling short. A significant share of global consumers do not purchase available aftermarket services—home delivery (29 percent), installation (54 percent), and warranty (65 percent)—but 15 to 20 percent did not purchase services because they were not offered.

Given the considerable untapped potential represented by aftermarket services, brands may have a strategic opportunity to differentiate themselves from their peers. Most crucially, brands may be missing out on opportunities to strengthen their interactions with consumers after the point of purchase—the period in the buying journey when efforts to foster loyalty and encourage future purchases could be most influential.