Property Newsletter | February 2023

Making it easier for brands
to understand their customers

Lightstone recently updated its demographic profiling solution, DemProKey, with the latest demographics for South Africa (2022). These updates are now reflected in the Footprint Market Reports and Kaleidoscope segmentation tools.

These tools are used by some of South Africa’s biggest brands – from Retailers and Marketers to Manufacturers and Property Developers – to understand their customers better.

South Africa’s changing demographic footprint

According to StatsSA, our population grew from 51.8 million people (since the 2011 Census) to 60.6 million people in 2022 (mid-year population estimates).

The challenge businesses working with this data on a localised level face is how to place this growth into the most accurate geographies (enumerator areas) and to identify whether this growth has changed the overall profile (age, race or income) of each area. Along with that, deriving profiles for new areas that have developed since the 2011 Census can also be tricky.

Lightstone solves this challenge by making it easier for businesses to understand the size and profile of existing customers and identify and understand new or competitive markets.

Businesses can expect more accurate demographic intel

Lightstone’s demographic profiling solutions are informed by the formal and informal property landscape, and in this most recent update to DemProKey we added just under 1 428 000 households (assumed to hold family structures like other households in their area).

To give businesses deeper and more accurate insights about their customers’ demographics, Lightstone also uses a consistent classification of income ranges and adjusts the rand value every second year (this latest update includes these adjustments).

When it comes to understanding the age distribution of individuals within areas, we use a combination of natural aging of the population and changes in owner age profiles in areas with high property churn. Along with that we also adjust to account for ‘rural/village-to-urban’ migration of job seekers and ‘urban-to-rural/village’ migration of children sent ‘home’. All of this contributes to your ability to understand your customer through location intelligence.