Swimming Pools, Trampolines, and Now What

Have you ever considered data as a detail needed for storytelling?

I began thinking about this when joining Demyst in March 2020. Coming from the fraud space, I had often thought about individual data points as not completely decisive on their own. Instead, the data that we ingest, the data that we exhale, collectively, tells a story about a person. So early on, I was on a prospect call when I was surprised and delighted to learn that a niche data point that P&C insurers often use from our data providers is how many swimming pools or trampolines are in a particular neighborhood or zip code.

I was totally fascinated by what this data point told about the people living there, what life phase they might be in, and what type of community existed. On the flip side, it ensured that insurers could effectively underwrite claims and insure their customers to the appropriate safety and risk considerations. It also underscored the importance of external data and how businesses can ultimately understand their customers better through it.

About the time I joined Demyst, the Coronavirus joined our every sentence. In sensitivity of the surroundings, I put this data story on hold. I’m glad I did so.

It led me to do a bit of digging on the question of other interesting data points coming out of the crisis. Data paints a picture of the human side of the crisis, to global trends and a better understanding of the pandemic’s influence on our day to day life. While I was still wondering what was up with trampolines and how that might affect insurance premiums, Google recently posted some interesting data that tells the story of quarantine from the perspective of a neighborhood, of a household. Sure, sneeze guards are up 200% but so are swimming pools, hair trimmers, and golf accessories.

Earlier this month the CEO of Demyst wrote a compelling piece about the New Normal and how companies can no longer rely on internal data alone. We’re seeing an unprecedented need to aggregate trends we could not have predicted. Clearly an example of that being a swimming pool boom which is both a reaction to quarantine and travel restrictions, and will have lasting and diverse impacts beyond insurance and consumer spending. I’ve spoken to many customers about what this means, and anecdotally I’ve spoken with many parents who are hard pressed to get a trampoline as they seem to be sold out everywhere.

No one could’ve predicted the Great Trampoline Shortage of 2020, but here we are. What companies need now is the data to say, “Now What?”.