Demand-centric Growth and Personas

BCG Perspectives today had one of their usually excellent articles, "The Prerequisites of Profitable Adjacent Growth". The article states:

"There are five ways for companies to expand into adjacencies [nearby markets]:

1. by exploring demand-centric growth
2. by cultivating a new organization with new talent
3. by employing separate governance
4. by adopting an experimental approach
5. by building the right cultural enablers."

(reformatted by me for clarity)

What caught my attention was the concept of "demand-centric growth". BCG defines demand-centric growth as follows:

"World-class innovators are moving from industry- or demographic-based segmentation to what we call “demand centric” segmentation, which identifies the drivers of decision-making by looking at the intersection of context (who the customer is, how he or she thinks, and what he or she does) and emotional or functional needs. Using richer data than was ever available before, companies can construct a “demand map” that clusters consumer choices in a particular category into common need bundles—or “demand spaces.”" (emphasis is mine)

 This concept of "demand spaces" looks very similar to what some people call personas. An excellent definition of personas is on slide 17 of this Powerpoint, "The definitive guide to engaging content marketing 141111". My interpretation of what BCG is proposing is shown in the graphic below.

The male and female information is traditional demographic information. The four characteristics on the X axis show four different emotional reactions to a particular product. Definitions are shown below.

• Critical--life and death
• Habit--required and periodic
• Must Have--status, self-esteem
• Aspirational--makes the world a better place for me or others

The Xs indicate the proposed adjacent markets, as defined by the matrix. You might ask how you would develop such detailed information. Customer mapping is one technique. See this excellent article, "Adaptive Path's Guide: Customer Mapping", for more detail on customer mapping. If you think such detailed information is not possible, see the bold text above. The amount of data available to marketers is on an unprecedented scale. Think of how much data the marketers will have when neuroscience advances :-)