Meet the .id team: Johnny Barnard

I grew up in the south eastern suburbs of Melbourne. As a kid I was into pretty standard stuff - playing and watching sport and general misbehaving, as well as devouring geographic, historic and sporting trivia.

I remember being envious of school mates who lived near the train station and cursed my 15-20 minute walk. I think that’s when I started to think about things spatially. Like many university colleagues, I was a voracious Melways reader as a kid!

In terms of the more specific spatial, demographic and forecasting that we at .id do - I was lucky enough to start my career in the Victorian State Planning Department in the area responsible for forecasting and monitoring residential land, housing and population.

When I look back on my time here there are so many memorable ways we’ve changed the landscape. A number of years ago, we helped the Richmond Football Club make some decisions about where to direct its marketing and physical presence. The club had been using a ground in Craigieburn in Melbourne’s outer north for their pre-season training and wanted to know if that was an area they should focus their future efforts on, to encourage fan and member growth.

Our work assessed the club’s current member and fan base and identified where its current members and supporters were located. In addition, our knowledge of historic and likely future migration patterns gave us a good feel for where supporters were likely to move to and live in future. The work resulted in the club abandoning its plans for the outer north, focusing instead on the outer south east. They were able to develop a relationship with a council in this part of Melbourne which continues to this day.

For the curious - here’s the case study from our archives. Johnny and our team worked hand in hand with Richmond to see where their fan base was and would be, resulting in a doubling of their membership and a firm footing in their new home.

Apart from the future of footy - my very favourite projects are anything with a map! The best ones are projects that help the clients take risk out of their future decisions, and to get there I really like getting a rich understanding of a new client’s market and what drives their business model. What I love best is getting an understanding of the risks and questions they’re facing into, then settling in to plot their customers out on a map. That is satisfying for me and always gives me a great starting point to understand what they’re about.

The most important lessons I learn come from our clients - they will generally know who their market is and who their competitors are in a way that I can’t, then I can find the best information and layer it on to what they already know. It’s impossible to deliver an off the shelf analysis and expect it to work. The best jobs are partnerships where you learn from each other. They help us learn what their market is, who their competitors are and how they are changing. We bring our knowledge of place to identify where that market and competitors are right now and where they will be in the future.

Over the years I’ve worked with an unexpectedly wide range of datasets – everything from regional TV ratings for a sporting organisation to data on preferred burial methods among different cultural groups, which is essential for planning cemetery ‘products’.

No matter the dataset, the goal is the same: help clients see their communities clearly so they can make confident decisions about the future.

Every project is a reminder that good decisions start with understanding people and place in equal measure. For me, that understanding began with a long walk to school and an old Melways. Today it continues in partnership with clients who know their communities best, and I hope I’m going to be mucking about with maps for them for a while to come.

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Meet the team of experts

Our specialists have deep expertise in demographics and spatial analysis, urban economics, housing research, social research and population forecasting