2.7B
Behavioral data points processed in 2024 across retail, media, and CPG verticals — the substrate of this year's report.
Volume VII · Annual Flagship · 2026 Edition
Gated Download
The State of the Outlier, 2026.
Abnormis' seventh annual investigation into the consumers your dashboards were never designed to see — and the eleven-month lead they give the brands paying attention.
- Cited in Harvard Business Review
- The Economist
- Journal of Consumer Research
Executive Summary
The customers your dashboards forgot.
In 2025, the consensus forecast from nine mainstream consumer trackers called for a flat year — cautious spending, brand consolidation, the end of the post-pandemic impulse cycle. They were right about the average. They were catastrophic about the minority. This year's State of the Outlier documents 2.7 billion behavioral data points across retail, media, and CPG, and the picture they paint is the opposite: a fractured consumer landscape in which a 480,000-person panel of high-deviation shoppers is driving 38% of category-defining purchases while remaining functionally invisible to panels built for the mean.
The report's central argument is straightforward. The brands that will win the next cycle are not the ones with the best average-customer models — they are the ones with the best tools for detecting which customers are about to leave the average entirely. We have spent seven years building that tool. This is what it has been telling us, and what we believe every strategy team in the Fortune 1000 needs to read before the next planning cycle locks in.
— The Editors, Abnormis Research
By the Numbers · Volume VII
What 2.7 billion data points told us that the consensus missed.
11mo
Average lead time our proprietary Outlier Index predicts category-disrupting behaviors ahead of mainstream trackers.
4.3×
Average lift in campaign conversion our clients see within the first 90 days of acting on an Outlier finding.
Inside the Report
Five chapters. One contrarian thesis.
A structured investigation — not a marketing deck. Each chapter closes with proprietary data, named categories, and the specific behavioral signature you should be tracking by Q1 2026.
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I
The Death of the Average Shopper
Why the bell curve stopped describing American consumer behavior in 2021, and why the brands still optimizing to it are bidding against ghosts.
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II
The 480,000
A profile of our longitudinal panel of high-deviation consumers — who they are, what they buy first, and how their purchase graph differs from the modeled average by a factor of seven.
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III
Eleven Months Early
Three case studies of category disruptions our 2024 report flagged in advance — and the specific signal pattern that preceded each one. A field guide for strategy teams building their own early-warning systems.
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IV
The Forty-One Signals
A complete reference to the forty-one behavioral signals that compose the Outlier Index, with worked examples from CPG, QSR, beauty, and streaming.
Authority
Who's reading the methodology behind it.
- Harvard Business Review Cited the Outlier Index in a 2024 feature on the limits of segmentation research and the rise of longitudinal high-deviation panels.
- The Economist Profiled Abnormis' panel methodology in its 2024 "Future of Consumer Intelligence" survey as an example of post-panel research design.
- Journal of Consumer Research Peer-reviewed the Outlier Index scoring methodology in a 2023 paper co-authored with Stanford behavioral science researchers.
- Market Research Society Named Abnormis "Most Innovative Research Firm" in 2023; the State of the Outlier report was cited in the accompanying award citation.
Among the growing field of behavioral research firms, Abnormis stands out for what it chooses to measure: not the center of the distribution, but the people moving away from it. The 2024 report made several calls that, with the benefit of hindsight, look prescient.
Gated · PDF + Appendices
Get the full 248-page report.
Volume VII ships as a 248-page PDF with 76 original charts, four data appendices, and a one-page executive briefing for distribution to your leadership team. Delivered within minutes of confirmation.
- 248 pages · 76 original charts · 4 appendices
- Read by 58,000+ strategy leaders annually
- Prior volumes cited in HBR, The Economist, and JCR