Valuegraphics has built the first global inventory of what everybody on Earth cares about.
Think about your 35th birthday: Were you substantially different than the day before? Probably not, and yet marketers automatically moved you from the 25-34 segment to the 35-44 segment, and targeted you differently. Wouldn’t it be useful to have a reliable way to gain insight into what was really happening without making broad generalizations?
The study of what motivates consumers at their core is a burgeoning concept called valuegraphics, and in this episode of The Groove podcast, I’m speaking to its inventor: David Allison, consumer behavior and marketing expert, and bestselling author of We Are All the Same Age Now: Valuegraphics – the End of Demographic Stereotypes.
Demographics help define your audience’s basic characteristics. Psychographics help identify their patterns of behavior. But connecting with your customers on a truly personalized level requires diving into their values—the things that matter to them the most.
For marketers, one of the lessons of the pandemic era is it’s more apparent how people are taking actions based on their core values than on the expectations of their demographic group. Within this “new normal,” David Allison’s field of valuegraphics is emerging as a framework for engaging with consumers in a way that’s most meaningful to them.
His new book, due out in late summer or early fall, will share more detail on how humans around the world are grouped in chapters and tribes according to shared values. You don’t have to wait that long to hear more insights from Allison, however, including thought-provoking findings from his global surveys about values-related differences in regions around the world. To begin your valuegraphics journey, listen to the entire episode of The Groove podcast.
Why it’s vital to add valuegraphics to your research
Allison and his team at The Valuegraphics Project have surveyed 750,000 people around the world to create the “first global inventory of what everybody on Earth actually cares about—what our shared core human values are,” he tells me. “We can use this to profile and create data-driven personas for any target audience.”
Allison isn’t advising marketers to ditch the use of demographics and psychographics in their research. He’s asking them to reconsider how they use those datasets, and to complement them with factors that are less tangible but more important.
“You still need demographics to describe a group of people,” he says. “[But] people who match each other demographically have very little in common when it comes to what they care about and how they make their decisions.” Psychographics, meanwhile, are limited to measuring “how people have behaved and felt so far, what’s already happened.”
David Allison, Founder, Speaker, Author
By adding valuegraphics to the mix, “you also know what these people care about as a group and you’re able to understand what you need to say to them and how you can engage with them and attract their attention,” Allison explains. “We talk about it like a three-legged stool of audience insight: demographics to describe, psychographics as a record, and valuegraphics to activate that target audience.”
Behaviors change, values don’t
Personal income, marital status, hobbies, shopping behaviors. All of these variables and more can change over time. Values, however, are fixed—Allison describes them as “the operating system for humans”—which is why identifying them is key to understanding what makes your customer tick.
He offers a pandemic-related example: “If family was the most important value in your particular valuegraphic profile going into the pandemic, and you go [into] lockdown, you’re going to double down on your family.” If ambition is your most important value, “you’d be doubling down and making sure your boss knew that you were working really hard and you should still get that promotion that was on the table [pre-pandemic].”
As life’s circumstances shift, those values won’t change, Allison adds, but “the way we behave based on those values will change.”
Three questions to get started with valuegraphics
Bringing the concept of valuegraphics into your marketing efforts isn’t a heavy lift, according to Allison. He tells me that getting started is as simple as asking your customers the following three questions from the 10-question survey in We Are All the Same Age Now:
1. Why do you go to work every day?
2. Why would you give away half your lottery winnings? (Not would you do this, but why?)
3. You get to write a letter to yourself from 10 years ago. What would you say and why?
By seeking answers from as many customers as possible, “you’ll start to hear patterns,” Allison tells me. The responses you receive? Those are your customers’ “values bubbling to the surface,” and he issues fair warning: “You can’t unsee this stuff.”
