Building Moonshots

WAY 19Get Ahead of Your Customers: Mixing demographic, generational, and user field data can reveal changes in future customer needs.

About the Way

Although multiple tools and techniques exist for understanding today's customers and their needs, what if your customers don't exist yet? When delivering a world‐changing solution that takes time to imagine, invent, and bring to market, how do you get ahead of future customers? The solution is to mix demographic data with generational profiles and user research to reveal and anticipate changes in future customer needs.

This approach draws from three primary sources of data. The first source is demographic data, often collected at the national or local level. “Demography is destiny” is a famous maxim often attributed to Auguste Comte, considered the father of sociology, who wrote how population trends and distributions could determine the future of a country. By following population growth projections, such as birth rates and immigration patterns, you gain one way to gauge future group movement. In fact, Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, saw demographic changes as the most reliable source of innovation opportunity. (See Drucker's opportunity list in Way 7: Filter the Noise.) Drucker notes, “because policy makers often neglect demographics, those who watch them and exploit them can reap great rewards.”¹

As a second data source, generational research—analyzed by groups like Pew Research—provides another lens to understand ...