As already illustrated, population refers to the number of people engaged on a particular topic either directly or indirectly. Please note this isn’t the total addressable market for a product or category but rather the number of people a topic is relevant to.
Now within that population, maturity tells us how many people have consensus on what this topic means. That is, how many people will proactively lead the charge in adopting solutions, trying new things, and in essence, pushing the culture forward.
So simply put, if you multiply maturity with the relevancy, you get the size of the lead consumer in this space - i.e. the consumer that will proactively drive new ideas, solutions, behaviors etc.
Let us take a tangible example. Below is a search for the relevancy of the topic of cleaning.
The topic is engaged by ~100M people in the US today and has a current maturity of ~54%. Meaning the portion of the population that is the “lead user” or the culture creator in this space is 54% of 100M = 54M. So in essence, because there’s a lot of maturity in this space, a LOT OF PEOPLE will want to try new things and engage in the space.
Meaning any solutions launched in this space would have immediate relevancy to 54M people in the country.
Now, what should those solutions be? For that, we need to dig into the culture and identify the dominant microcultures. These will tell us which areas of demand to deliver solutions for, and how to prioritize them in the context of cleaning.
For example, in the cleaning landscape, the opportunity for natural products is much smaller than for cleaning on the whole, where the number of people engaged drops to 43M and the size of the lead consumer drops to 22% of that = 9.5M people.
If you’d like to learn more about HOW to solution against different stages of the maturity curve please refer to our article on timing and activations against maturity.