Stephen Shaw interviewed me for his Customer First Thinking podcast in the fall of 2023, and the full transcript is on his site. He asked how a real estate marketer ended up building a global values database, so I told him about Bob and Sally. For years, every condo tower my agency marketed had the same target audience, aging baby boomers downsizing from the suburbs, and we called them Bob and Sally. Then at every ribbon cutting, with the shrimp on a stick and the cheap Prosecco, I'd look around and see that maybe 10% or 15% of the people in the room were actually Bob and Sally. Everyone else had bought for reasons we hadn't planned for, and I wanted to know what those reasons were.
We also got into how the research works. We never ask people what their values are, because everyone says yes to Family and yes to the environment, and nobody wants to look bad. We ask about their lives and listen for patterns. I used Halloween candy to explain it. You dump the bag on the table and sort it into piles, and when we did that with the survey answers we got 56 piles, one for each value. There's plenty of variety inside each pile, too. There are 912 different ways people describe the value of Belonging, for example. Stephen asked about emotions as well, and my answer was that emotions come from values. You're happy when something lines up with your values and angry when something threatens them, which is why brand emotion rankings swing around from year to year while values stay put.
You can read the original at Customer First Thinking.
My new book walks you through all kinds of ways to identify (and use) your values, and it's available for pre-order now. It's called The Values Map, and I would be very grateful if you pre-ordered a copy. My publisher would love it too. ❤️
Everything gets easier when you know What Matters Most.
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