Know Your Audience - Episode 6: Demographics Are Breaking

For decades, brands have understood their customers through age, gender, and income — but those categories are losing their power to predict what people actually do. This episode of Know Your Audience digs into Adobe’s 2026 consumer research, where a survey of four thousand people found that attitudes toward AI tracked comfort with the technology far more than any demographic line, and into recaps from this year’s IIEX APAC sessions showing how the rise of one-person households is quietly rewriting assumptions about who the customer is — alongside a reminder that behavioral data only means something in cultural context. It's a shift even the most careful institutions are acknowledging — Pew Research Center now treats generational labels with caution, and McKinsey finds the segmentation that works is built on attitudes rather than demographics. The takeaway for brand leaders: relevance is now earned moment to moment, not assigned by segment, and the teams reading their customers a layer deeper are the ones changing the first question they ask.