Meet Daniel Talbot, Strategy & Innovation expert at TRA. Drawing on findings from our SOLO research, Daniel explores how our focus on familiar audiences can leave others overlooked. He challenges brands to look beyond established assumptions, question who they're designing for and recognise the opportunities hiding in plain sight.

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What surprised me most in our SOLO research was discovering just how many people feel that the way they're living their lives isn't reflected in, or designed for, by the world around them. One in three people are Solo. That's a significant proportion of the population, and yet many feel overlooked by brands.  

What's even more surprising is how familiar the Solo experience is. Most of us will spend some part of our lives single. So how have we managed to overlook the needs of so many people, when their experiences aren't all that unfamiliar?

Status quo bias is certainly part of the problem. We tend to favour what's familiar, and Solo expert Peter McGraw put it, the people making strategic decisions are often married with children themselves. Their own experiences, combined with established ideas of what a typical household looks like, inevitably shape who we design for and whose needs we prioritise.

But I think there's something else at play. Something that, rather ironically, stems from our growing commitment to putting people at the centre of design.

How narrow target audiences can limit innovation

Today, we design for an audience. A segment. The person most likely to use our product or service. We invest time understanding their needs, motivations, behaviours and pain points. We strive to create experiences that make them feel understood, strengthen their connection with the brand and keep them coming back.

And rightly so. Audience-centricity has fundamentally changed how brands think about their customers, moving us away from designing products based purely on what businesses want to sell, towards creating things people genuinely need.  

The risk of defining your target audience too narrowly

The more narrowly we define who we're designing for, the more we risk overlooking those who sit outside that definition. We become so focused on meeting the needs of the people in front of us that we forget to look at who's missing from the room.

And in this case, sitting just beyond the edges of our carefully defined target audience is a substantial proportion of the population: Solos.  

We've become so accustomed to designing around couples and families that we've overlooked how many people are navigating life independently. Not necessarily because their needs are difficult to meet, but because they haven't always been part of the audience we've chosen to understand.

Why audience research needs to go beyond existing customers

The discovery stage of the design process is supposed to be about exploring the problem space before jumping into solutions. It's where we seek to understand people's needs, uncover tensions and identify opportunities that might not have been obvious at the outset. But how open is discovery when we've already decided who we need to speak to?

When brands set out to create something new, they typically have an audience in mind. Often, it's an existing customer segment whose needs aren't being fully met. Other times, it's a group they've identified as a growth opportunity, perhaps because a competitor is performing particularly well with them.

Both are perfectly valid starting points, but repeating this process time and time again can narrow our perspective. We may conduct excellent research with that audience and create a genuinely valuable product for them.  

But we'll never know what opportunities we might have found by looking elsewhere. The streetlight effect describes our tendency to search for answers where it's easiest to look, rather than where the answers might actually be.  

It's a useful analogy for how we approach discover. We look where we have the most information, where our assumptions feel strongest and where we can most easily find people to speak to.

Why brands are overlooking solo customers

The Solo research illustrates what can happen when this frame of reference is restricted. For decades, couples and families have been the default audience for countless products, services and experiences. They are familiar, commercially valuable and easy to build a proposition around.

Meanwhile, Solos have been there all along. Outside of dating products and services, their needs simply haven't received the same attention.

Our research found that 65% of Solos are satisfied with their lives, compared with 76% of people in relationships. That's an 11-percentage-point gap, despite most Solos being comfortable with their relationship status.

People can be perfectly comfortable living independently, while feeling less supported by a world that continues to assume they're part of a couple or family. It makes me wonder how many other opportunities are sitting in plain sight, overlooked because we're designing for what is known, rather than what could be.

How designing for overlooked audiences creates new opportunities

“A product should not be created for couples. It, it should be to single people first and foremost because even people in a relationship can use that thing alone.” – Male, NZ, 22

A product designed for an individual can often be used by someone in a relationship. But something designed specifically around a couple doesn't always work as well for someone using it independently.

Think about how we design and package everyday experiences. A holiday package priced around two people sharing a room. A meal deal intended for a family of four. A home with two or more bedrooms. All make sense for the audiences they're designed for, but each creates a potential barrier for Solos.

The opportunity is to question whether those assumptions need to be built into the product in the first place.

What would happen if we approached design by exploring audiences at the edge of our target? Or if designing for our customers, we engaged with non-customers? Or if we tried to design something that works well for everyone?  

In some ways, this takes us back to the principles of universal design. A concept that has been around for decades, challenging us to create products, services and environments that can be used by as many people as possible, without the need for special adaptation.  

This isn’t to say to not engage with the target audience, but starting here before engaging with this group may lead to a product or service that works for more than the target.  

What if the people we've traditionally thought of as being outside our target audience could help us design better experiences for the people within it?

Three ways to uncover new audiences and innovation opportunities

None of this means we should abandon audience-centricity or try to make every product appeal to everyone. Understanding who we're designing for remains essential.

But perhaps we need to be more deliberate about challenging who we include in that definition, particularly at the beginning of the innovation process.

1. Challenge assumptions about your target audience

Every innovation project begins with assumptions. About who needs something and what matters most to them. Rather than simply testing whether those assumptions are right, try turning them on their head.

What if the opposite were true?  

What if the people we've assumed have no need for our product are the very people who could reveal its next opportunity?

Including those who aren’t the hypothesised or target audience in the discovery process may help to uncover truths that might have otherwise been missed.

2. Use inclusive design to meet overlooked needs

Instead of starting with the needs of your most typical customer, consider those whose circumstances make your existing product or service harder to use.

Applying the principles of universal design, and exploring needs beyond the mainstream, can reveal opportunities to make the product or service work better for all, including our target audience.  

3. Test new ideas beyond your target audience

It’s important to know whether the target audience finds an idea desirable, different and whether they will actually adopt it. This testing should happen through the design and development process. But there's also value in putting those same ideas in front of people for who it hasn’t been designed for.  

Even though they aren't the people most likely to buy your product, their perspectives can expose assumptions, reveal unmet needs and help you to stretch the idea further. They might even help you uncover an entirely new audience.

Who is your brand overlooking?

Our SOLO research is a reminder that some of the biggest opportunities for innovation aren't necessarily found in the audiences we know best, but in the people we've yet to consider.

Explore TRA's SOLO research to discover what brands can learn from the one in three people navigating life independently, and where new opportunities for growth might be hiding in plain sight.

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