What brings a new customer into a category?
First findings from First Occasions, a study of how people come to try something new.
Recruiting new customers is often framed as a persuasion problem: build awareness, give people a compelling reason to choose, and make buying easy. But when participation in a category is shrinking, growth planning needs to address what brings people into it in the first place.
Alcohol illustrates the challenge. Gallup reports that 54% of American adults drink, down from 62% in 2023 and holding at a record low in 2026. For brands facing that contraction, winning a greater share of existing demand leaves a larger question unresolved: where will new demand come from?
That’s the question I’m exploring in First Occasions, a study applying occasion and demand space thinking to how people begin participating in a category. I’ve finished a pilot of 20 AI-assisted interviews about recent experiences of trying something new, from fitness classes and video games to restaurants and streaming services. Some early findings suggest that we should look more closely at the circumstances around recruitment:
Other people do much of the work. Their involvement extends from suggesting something to organizing, paying and joining in.
Reviews and offers may help convert interest more often than they create it. They featured prominently in general answers about trial, but had more specific roles in the stories people told.
The welcome is part of recruitment. Understanding and removing the mental and physical barriers to participation can make it easier to join and help someone feel comfortable before the experience begins.
First-time participants judge the experience against what they imagined. Understanding that expectation helps explain what they get out of trying something.
Enjoyment alone doesn’t explain repeat use. We also need to understand when and why another occasion arises.
Thinking about the first occasion in five steps
Much of my work in occasion and demand space research involves understanding how products fit into people’s lives. Who is there? What are they doing? What do they need from the experience? I wanted to bring the same perspective to the moment someone participates for the first time. For this study, I’m organizing the interviews around five steps:
Trigger: what brought the new thing to mind, and what was happening at the time.
Action: what happened between interest and trial, including who was involved and what had to be arranged.
Trial: the first experience itself: where and when it happened, who was there and what they did.
Reward: what the person got out of it, and how that compared with their expectations.
Follow-through: what happened afterwards, including repeat use, telling others or bringing someone else along.
These steps give us a way to examine influences that are usually considered separately. A media campaign may prompt interest, but a partner might organize the outing and an employee help someone feel comfortable once they arrive. What happens next could depend on a shared routine or an opportunity to return. Looking across the sequence should help teams identify where they can contribute, including places that sit outside the usual remit of customer acquisition.
An example: discovering wine on a weekend away
Consider this hypothetical account. It isn’t from the pilot, but illustrates the kind of detail I’m interested in:
“My wife and I got into wine this summer after a trip to Niagara. We wanted a weekend away somewhere nearby, something romantic where we could spend time outdoors. We saw some ads for wine country and thought it looked good. My wife enjoys wine sometimes; I hardly ever drink it. We looked up winery recommendations and visited a few places. One offered a free tasting, so I joined in. The guide was really enthusiastic and showed us how different the wines could be. We stayed for dinner, I ordered a glass of my favourite, and we bought a case to take home. Now I’d like to try more.”
The trigger combines an existing desire for a trip with advertising for the region. At the action stage, recommendations help the couple decide where to go, while one partner’s interest makes wine country a plausible destination for both. The trial offers an easy way to participate, with a guide helping the less experienced visitor discover what there is to enjoy. The reward includes the pleasure of the visit and a new appreciation of wine. Follow-through brings an immediate sale to the winery, but the interest in further exploration could benefit other producers too.
What interests me here is how many contributions sit around the product: the tourism advertising, the relationship, the recommendations and the guide. The winery benefits from circumstances it helped shape only in part. A question asking someone to select what encouraged them to try wine might capture a recommendation or free tasting, while leaving much of that process unexplained. Following the occasion gives us a better chance of understanding how those influences worked together.
What the pilot showed at each step
Trigger: recruitment can begin outside the brand’s audience
Other people’s interests were a recurring starting point in the interviews. Partners and children introduced activities that respondents might not have sought out for themselves. Specific content and communities also made unfamiliar products relevant. This suggests that our prospective audience may be wider than the people who already express interest in the category. Someone can become a participant because an activity serves a relationship or gives them access to something else they value. The research will explore which people, interests and communities create those connections, and how these routes into participation vary across categories. Targeting the likely buyer alone could miss the person who gives them a reason to buy.
Action: creating interest and helping people act are different jobs
Before the interviews, 12 participants selected reviews and nine selected promotions as things that encourage them to try something new. In the accounts they then gave, reviews and offers had more specific roles. The hiking story placed research on TripAdvisor after the initial idea; the streaming trials followed interest in content or a request from children. Explicit promotional offers appeared in three accounts overall. The interesting finding is the difference between identifying an influence and understanding its job. Some influences introduce the possibility, while others help someone choose, reduce uncertainty or make the arrangements. The full study will explore whether these roles recur across different kinds of first occasions, and which combinations of information, reassurance and practical arrangements help interest become participation.
Trial: making participation easy includes helping people feel comfortable
The pilot suggests that ease of trial has a social dimension as well as a practical one. Being able to join without booking or paying extra helped, but so did someone welcoming a beginner, explaining the basics or accompanying them. These details could be especially important when reaching people who doubt their ability or assume an activity isn’t for them. They also give experience design a role in acquisition: what a person sees on arrival, who acknowledges them and how they are helped to begin may affect whether tentative interest becomes participation. I’d like to understand which forms of support recur in these accounts, the doubts or difficulties they help resolve, and how those patterns vary by category and type of occasion.
Reward: a good first experience can offer more than product satisfaction
The interviews suggest that a good first experience can have functional, emotional and social rewards. People valued what the product or activity delivered, but also the pleasure of sharing it, the achievement of doing something they had thought difficult, or seeing others appreciate the result. These rewards can overlap: successfully preparing a meal can bring both personal satisfaction and enjoyment from the family’s response. The research will explore what characterises a good first experience, which rewards tend to occur together, and how they vary across categories and occasions. Expectations are part of that picture too, particularly when people discover that an unfamiliar activity is easier or more enjoyable than they had imagined.
Follow-through: a good experience needs another opportunity to be used
Positive reactions did not always lead to repeat behaviour. Among the accounts where people had returned, we saw several ways an experience could find a continuing place in their lives: a regular visit, content they wanted to keep watching, or an activity shared with someone else. This suggests that understanding the next occasion could be as useful as measuring satisfaction with the first. Follow-through also included bringing other people into an activity, so the value of recruitment may extend beyond the original participant. The full study will look at both forms of growth: what supports someone’s own continued participation, and what leads them to involve others. It will also examine whether that activity stays with the original provider or creates demand elsewhere in the category.
What the full study will explore
The full study will expand to 300 interviews to look for patterns in trial across categories, people and themes. AI-assisted interviews make it practical to collect detailed accounts across that range. By capturing the occasion in people’s own words before coding it, we can preserve distinctions that a predefined answer list might combine or miss. We can then examine the accounts through the five steps and revisit the original detail as new questions arise.
Some of the questions I’m most interested in are:
Trigger: How does interest develop through other people, adjacent interests and circumstances a brand doesn’t control?
Action: Where do reviews, offers and recommendations contribute, and what still needs to happen before someone tries?
Trial: What makes a first experience approachable for someone outside the category?
Reward: What characterizes a good first experience, and how do functional, emotional and social rewards combine across different occasions?
Follow-through: What creates a second occasion, how does participation spread, and who captures the value?
My aim is to help teams build recruitment more explicitly into their occasion and demand space planning. That means understanding which situations could bring new people in, what they need from the experience and what would give them a reason to return.
The full report will be free to access and is planned for January 2027. Sign up to receive a copy. For teams working on innovation, portfolio or creative strategy, I’m offering in-person planning sessions for $1,500 CAD to review the findings and explore their implications for your category and demand space planning.
A category oversample is available for $8,000 CAD for teams who want a closer look at people trying their category for the first time. It includes 50–75 additional interviews, a custom report and a working session. Please get in touch by 20 November 2026 to arrange this before fieldwork begins.
First published in The Knowledge Stack.