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.
Human beings are storytelling animals. A key communications strategy for the post-modern world is learning to tell a company story that resonates with one’s clients deeper motivations. How can research on values help you do that? One of the central tenets of the research we do is that values are not monolithic. Different people value different things and these values predict the kinds of stories that one enjoys. People who value Power, Achievement, Spirituality, Tradition, Conformity, and Security seem to prefer stories that are closer to them, which they can relate to. In contrast, individuals who value Universalism, Self-Direction, Stiumulation, and Hedonism report a greater preference for stories that provide more of an escape from their everyday existence.
Just as the internet and information technology has made matching in other domains (e.g. classified ads or home buying) more efficient, values based matching in the labor market is bound to be a problem tackled by data science teams at online companies in the near future.
Having trouble picking out the perfect gift? Here is your fool-proof guide to giving them something they’ll love! Ever wonder whether that new gadget is really what your special someone wants for Christmas? Will they really love that bread maker? If you’re not sure, Zenzi has some fail-safe tips!
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.
