Demand Landscape Mapping

Demand landscape mapping is the work of discovering the demand spaces in a market, sizing them, and establishing which of them a company has the permission and the assets to own. A demand space is a recurring set of customer situations, needs and moments, defined from the customer’s life rather than from the product catalog, and the valuable ones cut across the categories incumbents organize around. Vivaldi created the Demand Landscape framework and has run this work for companies including Coca-Cola, Bud Light, Migros and Samsung.

• Since 1999demand-side strategy for consumer and B2B companies
• 200+published case studies
• 10 officeson four continents
• 5xWirtschaftsWoche Best of Consulting, Strategy and Innovation
• Hidden in Plain Sightthe Demand Landscape, set out by our founder

When companies bring us in

Demand landscape mapping is usually bought by a CEO, chief strategy officer or head of growth in a business where the category is mature and the share data has stopped explaining the results. The trigger is nearly always a specific decision rather than a planning cycle.

• The category is growing more slowly than the ambition. The plan requires growth the current market, defined the current way, cannot supply.
• The innovation pipeline has gone quiet. Everything in it is a line extension, because the category is the boundary of the search.
• A competitor nobody listed is taking the occasion. The company losing volume and the company winning it are filed under different categories, so no report puts them on the same page.
• Two business units are investing against the same customer situation. Neither can see the other, because the organization is drawn by product and the demand is not.
• Before a portfolio, pricing or route-to-market decision. Each of those needs to know which situations the company intends to own, and most of them get made without that answer.

Why category maps stop explaining the results

A category map is drawn from the supply side. It groups products by what they are made of, which shelf they sit on and which internal business unit owns the P&L. It is useful for reporting and close to useless for finding growth, because no customer has ever organized their life that way.

• The competitive set is wrong. The companies actually taking the occasion sit in a different category, so they never appear on the strategy deck.
• The search space is wrong. Innovation briefed against a category returns variants of the category.
• The scoreboard is wrong. Share gains read as wins while the occasion itself migrates somewhere else.
• The map is static. It describes where volume sits today, which is a poor guide to where demand will pool in three years.

This is why so much analysis fails to explain what happened. It measured the wrong contest. Most corporate growth does not come from taking share, and a map built to track share will not show you where the rest of it comes from. The same point sits underneath our argument that most marketing is market-taking when the growth is in market-making, and that most brand strategy starts with the wrong unit of analysis.

There is a second failure, quieter and more common. Demand spaces get asserted rather than discovered. A workshop produces six evocative names, the deck circulates, and nothing in the data ever tested whether those six spaces exist, how large they are, or whether anyone moves between them. Anyone selling you a standard set of demand spaces for your category is selling a segmentation with a new name. Real ones vary by client, by category and by market, because they are discovered from evidence about behavior rather than invented in a room. That distinction is the whole argument for owning demand spaces rather than categories.

What our demand landscape mapping services include

Five bodies of work. Each can be engaged on its own, and most companies need three of them.

1. Building the evidence base

Demand spaces are found in occasion-level data, not in attitudes. The research frame is the 4C lens: consumers, category and culture, competitors, company.

• Behavioral and transaction data showing what people actually did, at what moment, rather than what they say they prefer
• Occasion-level survey work, sized so that each candidate space can be measured rather than described
• Cultural and trend analysis, to separate shifts already surfacing in the category from those still upstream of it
• Qualitative depth on the situations the quantitative work flags as large or fast-moving, which is where the proposition language comes from

2. Defining and sizing the spaces

A space that cannot be sized cannot be allocated against, so sizing is part of the definition rather than a later step.

• Each space stated as a situation, not as a demographic or a psychographic label
• Size, growth rate and current supplier set for every space, so the argument can be had in numbers
• The real competitive set inside each space, which routinely includes companies your category map never listed
• Overlap and migration between spaces, which is where the interesting propositions usually sit

3. Testing the right to win

Attractiveness is the easy half. The harder question is permission, and it is a research question rather than a capability question.

• Whether customers would accept your brand in that situation, tested rather than assumed
• Which assets, capabilities and partnerships you would have to deploy, and what they cost
• Where the advantage is difficult to copy, and where you would be a late entrant with a marketing budget
• What you would have to stop doing, since choosing spaces is also a divestment decision

4. Turning the map into an allocation

A landscape that ends at a map has produced a reading exercise. The output that matters is a shorter list with consequences attached.

• The two or three spaces to fund, with the proposition, portfolio and pricing implications of each stated explicitly
• The spaces to defend, the spaces to watch and the spaces to exit, named rather than left implied
• The innovation brief written from the space rather than from the category, which is the point at which the work starts paying
• The investment case, since capital allocation does not create value on its own, future demand does

5. Keeping the landscape live

The discovery work used to be a large research exercise and is now a data exercise with a research component. That changes what the output is for.

• A standing view that updates as behavior moves, rather than a document that ages from the day it is signed off
• The indicators that say a space is growing, splitting or collapsing, so the next budget cycle starts from evidence
• Shared definitions across markets and business units, so investment cases from different parts of the company can be compared
• Ownership and review triggers, so your teams run the landscape without us

How a demand landscape engagement works

1. Frame. The decision the landscape has to serve, the markets in scope, and the behavioral, transaction and category data already in the building. The output is a research design sized to the decision rather than to the category.
2. Discover. Occasion-level survey work, behavioral analysis, cultural and trend mapping, and qualitative depth on the situations the data flags. The output is a set of candidate spaces derived from evidence, not from a workshop.
3. Decide. Sizing, growth, competitive set and a permission test per space, resolved into a short list with the exclusions written down. The output is where to play.
4. Embed. Innovation, portfolio and pricing briefs written from the chosen spaces, the measurement that tracks them, and the governance that keeps the landscape current.

Demand landscape results

Coca-Cola: 25 product concepts from a five-market study of consumer needs

Coca-Cola needed to examine new business opportunities beyond strict category definitions and engaged Vivaldi to assess the real needs of consumers across five different markets and analyze shifts in consumers’ relationships to health and wellness. The work ran in five phases: cultural trends mapping and social analysis, a facilitated session to interrogate which shifts mattered, a global quantitative survey to identify growth platforms, a qualitative deep dive into the situations the survey flagged, and ideation. It produced a larger innovation platform and 25 fully-formed product concepts, tested in market-specific focus groups, followed by a one-year plan to launch a new consumer product. The order is the point: the evidence established the spaces, and the concepts were derived from them rather than the reverse. Read the full story: Coca-Cola’s consumer connection revolution.

Bud Light: demand moments defined, then 14% share of the seltzer space

Bud Light needed to move beyond beer and had to find opportunities for innovation inside the category and outside it. We looked at category trends, conducted social listening and interviewed consumers, then used quantitative findings to define consumer taste preferences and identify demand moments. Those moments became a brand architecture that organized the existing portfolio and exposed where the gaps were, and then a product pipeline. The launch of the Fall Flannel and Out of Office Limited Time Offer packs helped Bud Light gain 14% market share in the seltzer space. Read the full story: Brewing innovation: making a big splash beyond light beer.

Migros: four specialist retail brands positioned against real market opportunities

Migros had four specialized franchises operating independently without the expected results, and no agreement on how they should relate to the umbrella brand or to each other. Over a five-month engagement we reviewed existing market research to understand customer needs and pain points, then worked through analytical research and workshops with the brand teams to establish the viable market opportunities in each specialty market. We co-created clear positions for all four brands around the territory of customer-centricity, with autonomous communication strategies and action plans per brand. Read the full story: Migros’s brand repositioning for future success.

Why companies choose Vivaldi for demand landscape mapping

Three reasons come up repeatedly in the briefs we win.

• The framework is ours. The Demand Landscape was created by our founder Erich Joachimsthaler and set out in his book Hidden in Plain Sight. We are not applying a borrowed method to your category, and we do not arrive with a pre-built set of spaces.
• The spaces are sized, not named. Every space we hand over carries a size, a growth rate and a competitive set, because a space that cannot be measured cannot be argued for in a capital allocation meeting.
• Permission is treated as evidence. Whether customers will grant you the right to serve a situation is tested with customers. It is the most common reason a well-funded entry into an attractive space fails, and it is invisible in a market sizing exercise.

There is also a longer-run argument for working on the demand side at all. Our 2026 study of twenty-four years of stock market data, Unrealized Value, found that strong global brands outperformed the S&P 500 by 3.7 percentage points a year between 2001 and 2024: a dollar invested in that group became $15.85 against $7.03 in the index. Brands get strong by being the answer to a situation customers care about, which is what a demand landscape identifies and what a category map cannot.

How to evaluate a demand landscape or customer demand consulting firm

Including us. These are the questions worth putting to anyone selling this work.

• Ask whether the demand spaces are theirs or yours. If the firm arrives with a ready-made set of spaces for your category, you are buying a template. Genuine spaces are derived from your customers’ behavior and will not match a competitor’s.
• Ask what evidence establishes that a space is real. The answer should involve occasion-level data and sizing, not a workshop consensus.
• Ask who the competitors are inside each space. If the list matches the category report, the analysis never left the supply side.
• Ask how permission is tested. Attractive spaces with no right to win are the most expensive output of this kind of work.
• Ask what happens to the map in twelve months. A landscape that is a deliverable rather than a live view will be out of date before the second budget cycle uses it.

Demand landscape mapping vs segmentation vs market sizing?

The three are complementary and only one of them redraws your competitive set. If your question is who to target inside a defined market, start with segmentation and targeting. If it is which situations are worth competing for at all, start here.

Related work

Demand landscape mapping is usually the input to a decision made elsewhere. The most common next steps:

• Brand and product portfolio strategy if the map shows spaces your current portfolio covers twice, or not at all.
• Pricing strategy if the preference premium varies sharply between spaces, which it usually does.
• Commercial strategy if the route to market was built for the old category map.
• Customer journey mapping once the spaces are chosen and the question becomes which interactions inside them are worth building.

Our published thinking on demand goes further than this page can. The demand-led playbook sets out how demand-first companies innovate, the art of commercial clairvoyance covers mapping future demand rather than describing the past, the category entry points debate explains why occasion-level thinking got flattened into salience, and when demand becomes a problem for brands covers what happens when a space grows faster than a brand’s permission to serve it. Brand architecture is entering its second era works through what demand spaces do to a portfolio, and superconsumer strategies covers the people who occupy several spaces at once.

Demand landscape mapping is one of the capabilities in our competitive strategy group, which works on where a company competes rather than how efficiently it operates. That sits inside our business strategy and transformation practice at Vivaldi, the strategy firm behind the Demand Landscape and the Interaction Field.

Demand landscape mapping in the US and worldwide

We run demand landscape work from 10 offices on four continents, and most engagements are multi-market from the start. Space definitions travel: the situation a person is in when they want something quick, cheap and alone is recognizable in Chicago, Zurich and Singapore. The sizing and the competitive set inside each space do not travel, because the suppliers who have claimed that situation differ by market and so does the share of demand sitting in it. We run the research market by market and reconcile the landscape at the level of the situation, which is where the comparison is valid, so that a US business case and a European one can be argued against the same map.