Marketers are most effective when they are successful at aligning a product, brand, and/or message with consumers’ inner most values. Values are the driving force behind what people feel, think, believe, desire, consume, experience, and share. These characteristics go deeper than the demographic segmentation that marketers have been doing for ages. Researchers at Zenzi’s Social Values Project have worked to collect unique insights relating to people’s individual social values and how it relates to their buying behavior and preferences. After extensive research and testing, the team has classified six distinct orientations of values across which most people are distributed.
Values tie together behaviors across a wide array of domains and circumstances, such that understanding a person’s value driven behavior requires an equally wide array of values markers. Further, once you understand that behavior, the opportunities for value based decision making are similarly vast. Zenzi’s ValueBase service leverage our proprietary database to uniquely understand the modern consumer.
Zenzi’s Social Values Project seeks to identify key markers of consumer values in order to allow brands to communicate with their customers on a deeper, value-based level. Two of the value-driven motivational types the project has uncovered are Prestige Seekers and Pleasure Seekers. While these two types are similar, there are also key differences that could significantly impact the effectiveness of messaging targeted to these consumers. First let’s look at a description of both:
While it is certainly preferable to explicitly collect data on values from your customers, that may not always be feasible. However, you may already have data that helps you understand your customer’s values. Data on social interactions, openness to new experiences, and location can give you hypotheses that you can test more rigorously in your marketing and communications campaigns.
