Building Moonshots – Get Ahead of Your Future Customers
Tamara Carleton, PhD
Award-winning professor, industry advisor, and expert in radical innovation and strategic foresight
Co-authored with Dr. William Cockayne
From our book project on 50+ ways to build moonshots, Way #22 addresses the challenge of anticipating the desires of future customers.
Way #22: Get Ahead of Your Future Customers
Mixing demographic, generational, and user field data can reveal changes in future customer needs.
About the Way
While 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? Your team can mix demographic data with generational profiles and user research to reveal and anticipate changes in future customer needs.
This way 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. Peter Drucker, the father of modern management, saw demographic changes as the most reliable source of innovation because demographic events have known lead times, yet “because policy makers often neglect demographics, those who watch them and exploit them can reap great rewards”.
As a second data source, generational research – analyzed by groups like Pew Research – provides another lens to understand future customers. People born about the same time share an overall zeitgeist, as well similar experiences of broadly adopted technologies and economic activities. By lightly grouping people with their age cohorts, often in 5-10 year spans, these demi-generational profiles offer additional clues for how and why certain groups will likely behave as they move into different life stages in the future. As eminent social scientists Neil Howe and William Strauss pointed out: “Generations follow observable historical patterns and thus offer a very powerful tool for predicting future trends. To anticipate what 40-year-olds will be like 20 years from now, don’t look at today’s 40-year-olds; look at today’s 20-year-olds.”
A third data source is user field research, which helps check our assumptions of people’s beliefs and activities as they exist today. Specifically, organizational anthropology looks at current human behavior, borrowing techniques from the field of anthropology. This work began in the 1980s, when companies like Xerox and Boeing hired cultural anthropologists to help build user-friendly products. Soon user champions, such as Genevieve Bell at Intel, brought mainstream attention to the practice. By the mid-2000s, a US business professor described the rise of corporate anthropology based on its business popularity, as design experts helped popularize user needfinding. In 2021, Financial Times editor Gillian Tett renewed the importance for how anthropology can explain business and life.
Anthropology-based field research creates a baseline for understanding customers today and their long-term historical patterns. Adding demographics data and generational profiles extends this understanding into the future, allowing teams to identify, model, and measure which factors may likely change – and more importantly, not change – over time. This analysis can be done for a range of customers, including consumers, business roles, and even institutions.
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Value of the Way
Apple co-founder Steve Jobs notoriously said: “People don't know what they want until you show it to them. That's why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page.” Taking his quote with a healthy grain of salt, teams cannot rely on market research – no matter how well done – for inventing and delivering revolutionary ideas. Simply extrapolating from today’s customer research – imagining that an existing need or customer point-of-view (POV) will be the same in five or more years – risks inventing for a customer that has become outdated when your solution is ready. Instead, your team can build a practice and framework to look for shifts in future customer beliefs, behaviors, expectations, and goals as time ticks forward. By building a future customer POV from these three research-based data sources, your team will anchor your research and invention in measurable customer change.
Following the Way
When you define a customer for your next world-changing invention, build two personas for that customer. The first persona represents a detailed view of today’s equivalent customer. The second persona is more of an outline, representing the version today that is becoming tomorrow’s customer (i.e., the person’s younger self). Each persona describes that customer’s beliefs, values, behavioral patterns, motivations, and even history, which combines data from relevant demographic reports, generational analysis, and field research. By comparing these two personas, your team can discuss what similarities and differences, such as changing priorities, are emerging in your future customer – ultimately helping your team get a jump on the solution you’ve just started to build.
Living the Way
Example team discussion prompts:
Example in Action
Danish architect Bjarke Ingels has won numerous awards for his imaginative buildings and projects, including “Architectural Innovator of the Year” from The Wall Street Journal and one of the “100 most influential people in the world” by TIME magazine. Ingels sees himself as using architecture to turn fiction into fact, considering crazy possibilities such as: “How can a city simulate a Martian landscape?” or “How can a power plant function as a ski slope?” (The latter idea became the world’s cleanest waste-to-energy plant in Copenhagen.)
Since 2019, Ingels has been working on a masterplan for the Earth called Masterplanet, thinking ahead on how to sustain 10 billion people – when the current world population is roughly 7.8 billion. While fellow architects have been critical, Ingels told a reporter: “It might seem megalomaniacal to make a master plan for the whole planet, but we’ll be 10 billion people in 2050, so we have to design for it… One of the things we noticed is if we want to be as sustainable as possible, then in a small building, a house, a lot of things that are technically possible are not always feasible. But as you move from house to block to neighborhood to city to the entire planet, you get more and more possibilities for solutions.”
Source: GQ.com / Bjarke Ingels
Tamara Carleton, Ph.D. I’ll see your Steve Jobs aphorism and raise you a Jeff Bezos quote. <q>Much of what we build at AWS is based on listening to customers. It’s critical to ask customers what they want, listen carefully to their answers, and figure out a plan to provide it thoughtfully and quickly (speed matters in business!). No business could thrive without that kind of customer obsession. But it’s also not enough. The biggest needle movers will be things that customers don’t know to ask for. We must invent on their behalf. We have to tap into our own inner imagination about what’s possible.</q> The world changes when visionaries, inventors, and mavericks chase their imagination, build their intuition, and deliver the future. And to extend Drucker, this is a time-tested approach because people—your future Customers—are always changing! We grow, we learn, we age, we go through different phases of life… and let’s not forget that there’s always a new ‘generation’ emerging from childhood with their own baselines, expectations, and dreams. A short ‘lesson’ from this week’s breakthrough courses makes this point. As recently as 2019 (“in the Before Time, in the Long Long Ago” to quote Stan) the consultancy PwC published a truly wonderful article on opportunities that emerge when we invent for a four-generation society. As the article points out, “The longevity revolution is putting massive strains on all of our major social systems — employment, retirement, education, healthcare, housing, transportation, and food, as well as the environment.” (As an aside, Longevity was one of the much-discussed topics at Stanford University this week.) Coming to the future that is today, Bobby Duffy, director of the Policy Institute at King’s College London, has written a new book that explains the world in five (5!) generations. His book asks in the subtitle “Does when you’re born shape who you are?” which is a well-worn question, while her data brings us a five-gen world of Pre-War, Boomers, Gen X, Millennials, and Generation Z (Duffy’s earlier work at Ipsos already includes Gen α born around 2010… six-gen?!). Beyond longevity stretching our horizons, the speed of invention has made many demographers and social scientists question these age brackets as too broad; Millennials were the first generation to be subject to dissection as Old and Young depending on the technologies they experienced as children. Across the last two weeks I’ve had the pleasure of talking with new cohort of young, inventive mavericks (avg age is 20), who are already chasing ideas that seemed almost-impossible just a few years ago. The multi-generational, multi-speed world offers limitless opportunities for anyone willing to explore what’s just over the horizon and put it before tomorrow's customers.
Research Professor in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at EGADE Business School del Tecnológico de Monterrey
3yGreat, Tamara! Your next project on moonshots looks so inspiring! Eager to read it once it is done. Regards from Mexico!
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3yI hope they exist already, or I may not live long enough to serve those customers. I just haven’t had the privilege to call them my customers yet. Seriously - I get your point. But as I’ve done since I was a child, I’m always dreaming about a different kind if moonshot. Some ideas I still pursue are from when I was very young, but I could see it in my head. No joke - I have about a dozen in my head at the moment. These are my crossword puzzles. I’ve done the research and conducted “discrete experiments” and studies. But I also have to realize that taking action isn’t optional if you ever hope to make any of it real. So I’m about to incorporate them all and start going through the motions to begin their journey. Every last one. Why not? Unfortunately, as it turns out, I rarely do things the easy way, but it tends to work out in the end somehow. Just don’t take too long to jump in as I have. Again - best of luck with the book..