At the intersection of openness, curiosity, and value

The Person

Who a NEO is — and how they think

She booked her own flights — and upgraded. He has been to two concerts this month, neither of them the obvious choice. She reads the business section not because she has to but because she is curious. He seeks new restaurants and shares them freely. She runs three mornings a week, holds a gym membership she actually uses, and hosted a dinner party last Saturday. He was the first in his circle to build AI agents.

This is a NEO. Not a generation — you will find them in their thirties and in their sixties. Not an income bracket — though they do, reliably, spend. Not a lifestyle type in the magazine-demographic sense. A combination of attitude and behaviour that, taken together, produces a specific and commercially distinctive kind of person. Roughly one in four Australian adults. Five and a half million people.

Neuroscience is where the story starts, because it is where the behaviour originates.

The brain that says yes

When a non-NEO or Traditional consumer encounters a new product, a brand story, or an unfamiliar experience, the dominant response tends to be rational and evaluative. Price. Function. Familiarity. Risk assessment. The decision is, at its core, a calculation for the 11.5 million Australians with a Traditional mindset.

A NEO often processes the same stimulus through a more emotionally charged neural pathway. The limbic system — the brain’s emotional, motivational, and social intelligence network — engages earlier and more powerfully, while rational evaluation still occurs. The NEO decision is not irrational; it arrives through emotion before reason. And emotional encoding is more durable: a brand story that reaches someone limbically is remembered longer, trusted more readily, and acted on more reliably than one that lands only as a rational proposition.

This is why 84 of the 91 determinants in the NEO model are attitudes and emotions, not behaviours or demographics. The construct is, at its foundation, a description of how someone feels about being in the world — and that feeling turns out to predict, with striking reliability, how they spend in it.

The limbic system is also the seat of social intelligence: reading emotional cues, navigating complex social environments, and registering what other people think and feel. NEOs are not just emotionally engaged consumers. They are emotionally engaged people. That distinction is important for everything that follows.

Everyone notices price. Traditionals start and end with price, but for NEOs, price is the cost of falling in love. They read price as a cue to quality, provenance, and the emotional reward of a personal upgrade. The data is direct: 76% of Traditionals agree that expensive restaurants are not worth the money. The majority of NEOs disagree. They are not making a different calculation — they have already decided the experience is worth paying for.

Six dimensions of a coherent personality

The NEO mindset shows up consistently across six dimensions of life. What makes the construct useful — and unusual — is that these dimensions do not describe different types of NEO. They describe the same people.

Technology as agency

Where Traditionals often reluctantly experience technological change as something happening to them, NEOs experience it as something they direct. 80% agree that computers and technology give them more control over their lives, against 57% of Traditionals. 51% go out of their way to learn everything they can about new technology, against 29%. 52% say they look for new experiences every day, against 26% of Traditionals. They are the architects of their life’s outcomes, not its inhabitants.

Social leadership and word of mouth

66% of NEOs identify as a leader more than a follower, against 38% of Traditionals. 65% believe in taking risks, against 35%. And the line that connects attitude to brand growth: 88% of NEOs say that if they try something new and really like it, they always tell people about it — against 70% of Traditionals, on a base of 5.5 million people. A brand that wins a NEO does not win one sale. It wins a campaigner.

A progressive and optimistic worldview

50% of NEOs describe themselves as somewhat or very progressive on social issues, against 32% of Traditionals. And while 60% of Traditionals agree that they like things to stay the same, only 38% of NEOs do. NEOs are not defined by what they oppose. They are defined by what they are open to and desire.

The cultural omnivore, the active body, the reader, the early adopter, the social leader, the progressive optimist — these are not six different customers. They are largely the same person. Reach them on any one dimension, and you have a reasonable chance of reaching them on the others. That coherence is what makes the NEO mindset a useful construct, rather than merely a descriptive one.

And the construct is in permanent motion. NEOs are not a fixed point on the consumer landscape — they have already changed by the time the broader market catches up. They are, in cultural terms, the shapers of the Zeitgeist: defining tastes, attitudes, and behaviour. As the CEO of Roy Morgan has observed, “just when we think we’ve got a bead on NEOs, they’ve already changed and are shaping a future that everyone else will be following. That’s why the data science is so important.”

The Commercial Case

Why this person matters to your business

Put that person in a boardroom conversation about yield, loyalty, and earned media. Here is what the portrait becomes.

They spend more. Reliably, across categories.

NEOs index at two to four times the Traditional rate across premium categories. But the more instructive evidence is category-level data, because it shows the same pattern holding across sectors that have nothing obvious in common.

Take aviation. 32% of all Australians who flew Qantas in the last year are NEOs — against a 24% population share, and against 27% for Traditionals, a population cohort twice the size of NEOs. 37% of Qantas Frequent Flyer and Qantas Club members are NEOs. A NEO is more than twice as likely as a Traditional to hold a Qantas loyalty membership (11% vs 5%), and roughly three times as likely to have flown overseas for business in the last year — the highest-yield traveller category any airline carries.

They are financially active, not merely high spenders.

The same pattern matters acutely in financial services. A common objection is that NEOs spend more, so why would a bank, lender, insurer, wealth platform or property business make them a priority? The answer is that NEOs do not simply spend more. They save more, borrow more, invest more and use money as a tool for agency.

This is consistent with the NEO mindset. They are planners and architects of their own life outcomes, with a high internal locus of control. Money is not only a means of consumption. It is a means of movement: into a better home, a more flexible life, a stronger investment position, a business idea, a capability upgrade, or a future they feel they are actively designing.

The data bears this out. NEOs are 76% more likely than Traditionals to invest in property, and 89% more likely to rent an apartment to others. That makes them valuable not only as premium consumers, but as borrowers, savers, investors, landlords and long-term financial clients. For a financial services business, the NEO opportunity is not a spending story. It is a balance-sheet story.

The same pattern holds beyond finance: in dining, cultural spending, home interiors, technology adoption and other categories where quality, control and future value matter. It is not a coincidence of demographics. It is the same underlying construct — openness, curiosity, means, willingness to act — showing up wherever quality consumption occurs.

They amplify your marketing spend.

At best, a spend that reaches a Traditional produces a transaction. A spend that reaches a NEO produces a transaction and a network effect. 88% of NEOs will tell someone when they discover something they love.

This changes the mathematics of marketing allocation. Spreading marketing spend evenly across the population means roughly half of it reaches Traditionals, who spend less, less frequently. The same dollar concentrated on NEOs buys more transactions and more earned media. The leverage is genuine, and it compounds: a NEO who becomes a loyal customer does not just return. They recruit.

They set the direction of travel.

NEOs are early adopters by disposition, not by demographic accident. Their openness to novelty and tolerance of risk means they are consistently the first movers in new categories — and the population that watches them, consciously or not, is larger than NEOs themselves. Early adopter minorities disproportionately shape the behaviour of the majority that follows. NEOs are not just a premium cohort. They are a leading indicator.

The concentration argument.

The strategic case is simple. If a mindset represents 24% of the population but accounts for the majority of premium-category consumption, and if that same group has an 88% advocacy rate, then equal-weight marketing becomes inefficient. NEO strategy is not about narrowing ambition. It is about concentrating investment where value, influence, and future demand are already gathering.

The NEO Model

Where it came from, and why it is robust

The model at a glance

The NEO model is my own. I built the first version in 2006 from a deliberately commercial starting point: not what these people are like, but what separates them — specifically, in ways that matter to any business that sells something worth paying for. The intellectual property — the indicator set, the weightings, the scoring logic, and the classification definitions — is mine. Roy Morgan provides the platform: Single Source, a deep and continuously refreshed survey of Australian adults, through which the model is operationalised at scale.

The model was built with spending data at its core. Discretionary expenditure — what people actually spend across credit and financial products, travel, dining, entertainment, household goods, technology, and personal services — provides the commercial criterion. Attitude and behaviour indicators are retained because they discriminate between high-spend and low-spend consumers. An indicator that describes NEOs colourfully but does not help explain spending is not useful.

Every adult in the Single Source database receives two scores: an Attitude score and a Spend score. People who rank high on both scores are NEOs. People who rank low on both are Traditionals. The NEO population — roughly 24% of Australian adults, approximately 5.5 million people — combines the attitudinal profile with the demonstrated means and willingness to act on it. Within NEOs, Super NEOs are the upper half, and Hyper NEOs are the upper decile, where scores are at their strongest.

The model has been refined over two decades. The 2024 review retained only those indicators that held their discriminant power as the population and survey evolved. The robustness of the construct rests on independent confirmation: cultural attendance, physical activity, technology adoption, advocacy rates, and the Qantas numbers all show the same high-value pattern outside the model inputs.

A fuller methodological note appears in the appendix.

All empirical figures in this document are drawn from Roy Morgan Single Source Australia, DEC25TOT database, January to December 2025, weighting period.

Bringing It to Life

How NEO targeting works in practice

Because the NEO model is operationalised through Roy Morgan’s Single Source database, any Single Source variable — media consumption, category behaviour, brand usage, attitudinal measure — can be cross-tabulated against the NEO classification. A client in financial services sees NEO behaviour in their category. A client in travel sees it in theirs. A client in FMCG sees it there. And NEOs can be activated across all channels and platforms.

The practical outputs are of three types.

Sizing and opportunity

How many NEOs are in the relevant category? What share of category volume do they represent? How does their consumption compare to that of Traditionals at equivalent population size? These questions establish the commercial case for reallocation — and typically produce the most persuasive single influence in a strategy deliberation.

Profile and resonance

What do NEOs believe, do, and value in ways that are relevant to this category and this brand? Where are the specific points of connection between the NEO mindset and the brand’s existing proposition — and where are the gaps? This work produces the brief: the attitudinal territory a brand needs to occupy to earn NEO attention, advocacy, and loyalty.

Media and channel

Where do NEOs consume media? Which platforms, formats, and contexts over-index for NEO reach? How does a media plan built around NEO reach compare to one built around conventional demographic reach? This is where the targeting becomes operational — and where the concentration argument translates into specific investment decisions. NEOs are fully operationalised for immediate activation — across social media, search, programmatic, and traditional media.

The person in the opening pages of this document — the one who upgraded her flight, read the business section, hosted the dinner party, and told everyone about the restaurant — she is in the data. The NEO algorithm finds her. The question is whether your strategy is built to reach, acquire and retain her.

APPENDIX

Methodological Note

A fuller account of the NEO model

The origin: 2006 and a deliberately commercial question

The NEO model was developed in 2006 from a commercial question: what separates high-value consumers from low-value consumers in ways that matter to businesses selling products and experiences worth paying for? The design intent was not to describe people colourfully. It was to identify the attitudes, behaviours, and values that discriminate most sharply between social groupings and predict commercial influence.

The modelling approach used psychographics, discriminant analysis, and multivariate modelling to characterise the differences between the social groupings, then a spending propensity model to identify their respective commercial influence. The defining variables are chosen because they rank highly and discriminate the most. The point was always to understand what made people different, not what made them the same.

The intellectual property — the indicator set, the weightings, the scoring logic, and the classification definitions — belongs to Dr Ross Honeywill. Roy Morgan provides the platform: Single Source, a deep and continuously refreshed survey of Australian adults, through which the model is operationalised at scale.

Spend as the criterion variable

Spending data sits at the core of the model. Discretionary expenditure — what people actually spend across credit and financial products, travel, dining, entertainment, household goods, technology, and personal services — provides the commercial criterion. Attitude and behaviour indicators are then selected for their power to discriminate between high-spend and low-spend consumers.

This design choice is deliberate. The construct is commercially directed, but it avoids determinism. Attitude variables are required to have independent explanatory power: to capture something real about how people think and feel that helps explain why they spend differently, rather than merely correlating with spending after the fact.

Two decades of refinement

The original model contained a longer list of attitude indicators. Over two decades, comprehensive reviews progressively reduced the indicator set, retaining only those that held their discriminant power as the population and survey evolved. The 2024 review was the most rigorous: variables that had weakened as discriminators were removed, and updated measures of early adoption and social leadership were evaluated and incorporated where they proved their power against the spend criterion.

The result is a leaner, more robust construct. The indicators that remain are there because they work.

The dual-score construction

Every adult in the Single Source database receives two scores.

An Attitude score is built from indicators including curiosity, openness to novelty, risk tolerance, leadership orientation, aesthetic engagement, social values, technology agency, and brand relationship. Each indicator is weighted to reflect how strongly it discriminates between NEOs and Traditionals.

A Spend score is built from demonstrated discretionary expenditure across the categories in the model: credit and financial products, travel and accommodation, dining and entertainment, household goods and technology, and personal services. The spend data divides the population into thirds.

People who rank high on both scores are NEOs. People who rank low on both are Traditionals. The NEO population — roughly 24% of Australian adults, approximately 5.5 million people — combines the attitudinal profile with demonstrated means and willingness to act on it. Within NEOs, Super NEOs are the upper half, approximately 2.9 million people, and Hyper NEOs are the upper decile, roughly 560,000 people, where scores are at their strongest.

Why the construct is robust

The case for the NEO construct rests not on any single statistic but on the coherence of the pattern across independent measures. Cultural attendance, physical activity, technology adoption, advocacy rates, and the Qantas numbers come from survey responses that have no relationship to the model’s input variables. They independently confirm that the construct identifies real people with a robust, evolving, consistent, and commercially meaningful profile.

The most direct validation is that the attitude indicators most predictive of high discretionary spending — cultural performance attendance, restaurant dining, live events, and travel — are the same indicators that sit at the top of the High NEO tier in the model. The model found them because they discriminate in spending. The independent data confirms that discriminant value.

All empirical figures in this document are drawn from Roy Morgan Single Source Australia, MAR26TOT database, April to March 2026, weighting period.