Foresight · Capability Building · Retail
Walmart Mexico
The pandemic accelerated the adoption of digital technology among a broader base of Mexican consumers, fundamentally changing their behaviors and expectations almost overnight. Walmart Mexico's understanding of its low-income consumer base — a critical demographic and a significant growth opportunity for the organization — was built on a pre-pandemic world that no longer existed.
They needed a new picture of who that customer would be, and what they would need from retail, over the next ten years.
Type: Foresight & Innovation Program
Duration: 6 months
Partner: PSFK / 2021
The Challenge
Walmart Mexico is one of the largest retailers in Latin America, serving millions of low-income shoppers across hundreds of stores and formats. In 2021, working through PSFK, I led a comprehensive foresight and strategy program — The Customer of the Future — to help Walmart Mexico understand how its core customer would change over the next decade, and what that meant for how the company would need to evolve its retail experience, operations, and service model.
The Work
The engagement was built on a rigorous, multi-method research foundation. We conducted a STEEP analysis identifying six mega shifts that would most significantly impact Mexico over the next ten years — Healthcare Disruption, Climate Change, Institutional Trust Gaps, Changing Family Dynamics, Digital Economy Acceleration, and Post-Covid Impacts. Layered on top of this were macro and micro trend analyses, extensive ethnographic field research across key Mexican markets targeting low-income consumers, and a quantitative polling study conducted across the country.
From this research foundation, we developed a set of Future Household Profiles — detailed portraits of the Mexican consumer of 2031, their behaviors, needs, expectations, and psychographic profiles — alongside sixteen opportunity areas for Walmart Mexico to explore across retail experience, digital services, community engagement, and operational transformation.
The opportunities were evaluated and prioritized based on consumer willingness/need, impact/scalability and feasibility. The five most compelling opportunities were developed in depth — each one addressing a different dimension of how Walmart Mexico could evolve its stores, services, and community relationships to meet the needs of a customer who was changing faster than the organization's existing model could track.
Each opportunity was brought to life through five detailed consumer scenarios — step-by-step future purchase journeys following specific consumer personas through their interactions with a transformed Walmart Mexico experience.
The Outcome
The work culminated in an executive presentation delivered directly to Walmart Mexico's CEO and senior leadership team, along with a 10-year innovation roadmap outlining the operational investments, capability requirements, and workforce implications of bringing these opportunities to life.
Critically, the engagement was designed not just to deliver research and recommendations, but to serve as a learning pilot — teaching the Walmart Mexico organization how to embed foresight and innovation thinking into its own operational approach. The goal was to leave the organization with both a strategic direction and the muscle memory to continue developing that capability independently. The engagement was structured as Phase 1 of a three-phase program, with Phase 2 focused on translating the research into an operational transformation roadmap.
The strategic direction we mapped has since been validated by Walmart Mexico's own trajectory. In the years following the engagement, the company transformed from a network of physical stores into an omnichannel platform — with e-commerce sales growing over 370% between 2019 and 2023, more than 1,000 stores gaining on-demand capabilities, and the company's financial and digital services businesses reaching millions of users. The omnichannel and digital economy opportunities we identified as priorities in 2021 became the exact pillars of Walmart Mexico's growth strategy in the years that followed.
370%
E-commerce sales growth at Walmart Mexico between 2019 and 2023
10yr
Innovation roadmap delivered to guide operational transformation
16+
Opportunity areas developed across retail, digital, and community
1
Executive presentation delivered directly to the CEO and senior leadership team