How Uncovering Values Unlocks Insights

In this episode of the Consumer Insights Podcast, we speak with David Allison, Founder of Valuegraphics.

Are you paying attention to who your customers are? Or are you only paying attention to what they are? 

While demographics have a purpose, they can’t give you a deep understanding of what really drives people. And that’s where the role of values comes in.

In this episode of The Consumer Insights Podcast, Thor is joined by human values expert David Allison, Founder of Valuegraphics and author of The Death of Demographics and We Are All the Same Age Now. 

They cover:

• What valuegraphics are and how they came to be

• How psychographics, demographics, and valuegraphics work together

• The role that values play in human motivation

• How values can help unlock not-so-obvious insights 

• Why understanding employee values can transform the workplace

• The major flaw with demographics

• How the “values economy” changes everything

• David’s new book, the Death of Demographics

If you’re interested in learning how to understand who your customers are and not just what they are, tune in to this episode of The Consumer Insights Podcast.

You can access all episodes of the Consumer Insights Podcast on Apple, Spotify, Google, or use the RSS feed with your favorite player. Below, you'll find a lightly edited transcript of this episode.

Thor Olof Philogène: 

Hello everyone and welcome to the Consumer Insights Podcast. 

Today, I'm excited to have a brilliant thought leader in the research and insights industry joining me for what I know will be a fantastic conversation. 

I'm thrilled to introduce today's guest, David Allison, founder of Valuegraphics, an impressive global inventory of core human values. He's a human values expert, global researcher, keynote speaker, and bestselling author. Thank you so much for joining me today, David.

David Allison- 00:01:00: 

Thanks for having me over. I'm always excited to talk to people who understand the value of good consumer insights and data about human behavior.

Thor - 00:01:10:

We love that, and our audience does as well. So firstly, maybe you could take a couple of minutes to tell us about yourself, your journey, and how you came to work in the role you're in today. What inspired you to found Valuegraphics?

The story behind valuegraphics

David - 00:01:24:

Yeah, well, it's a very interesting story actually. I had a marketing strategy company, and we specialized – I live in Vancouver on the west coast of Canada. So anybody who knows anything about Canada or about Vancouver or about real estate will get this point – our company specialized in real estate development. So all the developers in town, and in fact, many from all over the world, would come to my company and say, "We're building a new tower. What should we call it? Let's do the marketing campaign. Let's figure out what the presentation center looks like and all that kind of stuff." 

So like everybody in every industry, we'd always start with a description of who we were building the thing for and who our audience was. And it was inevitably, given the time period we were doing this and the kind of product that my clients were building, it was inevitably aging baby boomers who were leaving their single-family home in the suburbs and moving to a stacked urban environment, and trying to maybe put a little bit of money in their pocket to buy a home down south somewhere with a nicer winter.

And so we'd run around and spend, you know, sometimes a million bucks trying to get these people to come and buy condos or resort homes or whatever it was we were selling. And the nice thing about that industry from a research perspective is you get to sort of have a beginning and a middle and an end. 

So within about three years after spending a bunch of money on a target audience, we'd get to stand in a room with them and go, "Look, look who's here." But you don't get to do that with big-brand corporate advertising, right? Like Coca-Cola brand advertising is gonna go on till the end of time. You don't get to actually stand in the room and see who are the people that it worked for. 

And over and over again, the same thing happened. I'd be in that room, I'd look around, and about 10 or 15% of the people in the room matched the target audience description. And so I just begged the question, who the heck were all these other people? And why were you here? 

And over and over again, the same thing happened. I'd be in that room, I'd look around, and about 10 or 15% of the people in the room matched the target audience description. And so I just begged the question, who the heck were all these other people? And why were you here? 

Like I hadn't bought any ads for you. I hadn't thought about you in a strategic sense. But thank you. Thank you for being here. We sold out the tower. You made me a hero. My client's happy. And so we just kept doing it over and over and over again.

So when I sold the company, I thought, you know, I wanna try and solve that. I wanna try and figure out what that 85-90% inefficiency was, and that's where it began. I was trying to sort out how people make decisions to do things like buy a condo or go on a vacation or choose the sweater that you're wearing, that you went into a store at one point and decided that's the sweater for me. 

How does that happen? And that takes us into behavioral science and decision-making processes and the prefrontal cortex and neurology and all that other kind of stuff. But the big beginning of it was just noticing this massive inefficiency in everything we did and trying to figure out an answer.

David's definition of an insight

Thor - 00:04:04:

What a journey. There's so many questions I wanna ask you, David, but if we start things off, I mean, this is the Consumer Insights Podcast. I'd really like to understand how you define an insight.

David - 00:04:18: 

Interesting. Well,  most of the time I'm not talking to insights professionals, so we're talking to a broader audience of people who are marketing or management or C-suite executives or whatever it might be, B2B, B2C. And so I tend to dumb things down to the lowest common denominator. 

And we actually have a little story we tell about a three-legged stool. And we think there's a three-legged stool of consumer insights that we should all be standing on because as we all know, a three-legged stool is a very sturdy base to stand on to launch whatever has to come next. 

And so the three legs are demographics, which we'll talk about if you'd like. I'm a big demographic disruptor. I think demographics are good for a certain small number of things and then we, those poor demographics, we try and make them do all kinds of stuff that they were never suited for. Like millennials, all like their avocado toast and baby boomers all suck at technology and all that kind of stuff, right? It's none of it's true, but we, you know, we need to find insight somewhere. So we try and pull it outta thin air. So that's one leg of the stool: demographics. 

We just say demographics are great as a describer. They describe a group of people, they tell you what they are. They're male, they're 18 to 24, they make a hundred thousand dollars a year, whatever, whatever, whatever. They just describe them, but that's it. 

And we just say demographics are great as a describer. They describe a group of people, they tell you what they are. They're male, they're 18 to 24, they make a hundred thousand dollars a year, whatever, whatever, whatever. They just describe them, but that's it. 

Psychographics, big umbrella term for all kinds of stuff. Anything that's about how people have behaved or felt or moved around the world and gone through the rituals of their day. All of that data, and it's been fascinating over the last 10 or 20 years, how that field of psychographic insights has just exploded with new technologies that are available and AI bots that can scrape the internet and tell us what people are saying on Twitter and all kinds of amazing stuff.

But all of that data comes from exactly the same place, all of it, no matter how fancy the technology is. And that's the past. Because if we know it, we write it down, it's done. Even if it happened 10 seconds ago, it's historical. 

Valuegraphics are the third leg of the three-legged stool. Demographics to describe, psychographics as a record, and valuegraphics to influence what happens next. When you get all three, you got a nice, sturdy stool to stand on.

So demographics describe a group of people. Psychographics tell us how they've behaved and felt and bought and shopped so far. But what we're all trying to do is get people to do something next. And so that means we need to understand how people are gonna make that decision so that we can intervene.

And to do that, we have to go back into neurology, for one. We can talk about a lot of different behavioral science specialties, but neurologists will tell you that it's our prefrontal cortex that makes all our decisions, and it only uses one set of filters to do that, and that's our values. 

So valuegraphics are the third leg of the three-legged stool. Demographics to describe, psychographics as a record, and valuegraphics to influence what happens next. When you get all three, you got a nice, sturdy stool to stand on.

Valuegraphics, demographics, and psychographics

Thor - 00:07:07:

I love how you describe this. Let's spend some more time on valuegraphics. Could you perhaps give us an example of a time when you've used valuegraphics to help a client uncover insights that have led to innovation or that allowed them to get to another level for a product or anything of the sort?

David - 00:07:27: 

Sure. First though, let me just give you a little bit of context about valuegraphics because we all know what demographics are, and we're all familiar with psychographics. So valuegraphics is the sort of the elephant in the room right now in this conversation. Because we've mentioned the word, but nobody knows really what it is. 

Thor - 00:07:41: 

Tell us! 

David - 00:07:42:

So what it is: We went out and said, after, you know, trying to solve the mystery of why those people were all in the room, who I hadn't done anything to advertise for, “Why were they there?” And said, “Okay, it's about values.” That's what the psychologists will tell you. Sociologists will tell you, neurologists will tell you. Even psychiatrists will tell you that at the end of the day. Boil down all the thinking, and they don't agree on very much, all of those different behavioral sciences. But one thing they agree on is that humans are motivated by their values and not much more. Values drive everything that humans say and do and feel.  All day long, every day, from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to bed. 

We are values junkies. We're running around chasing our values all day long. It's how – that's what being human is. You don't get to opt out of the system. That's how we're built. That's what humans do. So that's where the light bulb went on and we thought, “Okay, well what we need to be able to do is look at the shared values for a group of people so that we know kind of what their GPS system is. How are they gonna decide, like a school of fish, are they gonna swim this way? Are they gonna swim that way? What's gonna get them to do this thing or do that thing?”

Boil down all the thinking, and they don't agree on very much, all of those different behavioral sciences. But one thing they agree on is that humans are motivated by their values and not much more. Values drive everything that humans say and do and feel.  All day long, every day, from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to bed. 

So we started looking around, and we found a few different groups that had tried to do some value studies, but they all seemed fatally flawed in one way or another. And so we thought we better build our own. So here we are fast forward seven and a half, almost eight years later, and we've done three-quarters of a million long-form qual quant surveys around the world in 180 countries, nine regions. We look at the world broken up into nine regions. And a team of really fascinating and amazing translators helping us so that this stuff isn't Anglocentric.

We've worked in 152 different languages around the world, and we've built a random strat stat rep of the population of Planet Earth. 

And as far as we know, it's the largest random strat stat rep of the population of Planet Earth has ever been built. And we're accurate across all 180 countries. And what we've measured and mapped, with a plus or minus 3.5% level of accuracy in a 95% level of confidence, which as you know, is fairly rigorous, we've mapped the core human values of humans around the world. 

So we have this global record of what we all care about so deeply that it drives all of our decisions and emotions. So now, having done that work, I can tell you with mathematical certainty that there are only 56 things that drive what humans do.

So the job we do for our clients is, they come to us and say, "We wanna understand people who are gonna buy reading glasses in Belgium." We go, "Okay, cool." We can come back to them, and I can go into all the methodological nuances. But basically, at the end of the day, we come back and say, "The people who are gonna buy those reading glasses in Belgium, of those 56 values, these are the five they have in common." And those five are determining how that school of fish is moving. 

So if you're gonna try and sell them those glasses, you need to understand what your product or service or brand can bring to the table that'll get that school of fish to go, "Oh, those are the reading glasses that we want.” Up until now,  we've been guessing, we've been looking at demographics and going, "Well, they're baby boomers, so they must like jazz." And they psychographically, they've bought three pairs of reading glasses a year for the last three years. We know that about them, and they won't really like them because it reminds them they're old every time they put them on. That's some psychographic information we have about them. 

Just knowing that one thing, that they will make a decision, they will say yes if you can show them how these glasses are gonna help them be a better version of themselves tomorrow than they are today. Just with that one extra piece of information added to the demographics and psychographics, you suddenly know what you need to say, what you need to do, how you need to steer the ship so that you can get in front of that school of fish.

And based on that, we're gonna hire a jazz quartet and we're going to call these reading glasses "Jazz Glasses", and we're gonna run with what we can around that, those kinds of insights. 

But now if I can also tell you that the people that we've talked to who are interested in those reading glasses, the folks who are your target audience in Belgium for these particular reading glasses, one of the drivers they have in common is personal growth. One of the 56 values. 

Just knowing that one thing, that they will make a decision, they will say yes if you can show them how these glasses are gonna help them be a better version of themselves tomorrow than they are today. Just with that one extra piece of information added to the demographics and psychographics, you suddenly know what you need to say, what you need to do, how you need to steer the ship so that you can get in front of that school of fish. Wow. There's some mixed metaphors. Get in front of that school of fish. And get them to pay attention, because that's what they're hunting for. 

They're hunting for personal growth solutions. It's a little more complex than that, but that's the basis of what valuegraphics are all about. We help people understand what humans are gonna respond to, what values will get them to pay attention, to be influenced, to be engaged, to say yes. That's the easiest way to put it, I guess. 

How understanding values can unlock insights that drive better business decisions

Thor - 00:12:37: 

David, I am so curious, and I know that the audience is as well. Tell me a bit when you've helped a client leverage valuegraphics to uncover an insight and create an opportunity and run us through the whole journey and all the way to the end result.

David - 00:12:55:

Okay, so I'll drop a few names here. People whose data and stories I won't share, but just so that you know that this very simple example I'm gonna give you, it blows up, and we end up working around the world for PayPal as an example, helping them understand their consumers compared to the other folks who use other kinds of checkout mechanisms online for online shopping and things like that. We worked with Lululemon, we worked with the United Nations Foundation. We've worked with Allstate Insurance, I mean all kinds of big, giant brands. 

But the story I'll tell you to help you understand how this works is a very small story about an apartment complex in Phoenix, Arizona. Now, if anybody listening has ever been to Phoenix, you know, it's a hot, hot, hot desert city. 

There are days where I've been walking the streets of Phoenix, and you literally, not even joking, can melt plastic on the sidewalk. The soles of your shoes sometimes get melted just walking around on their hottest days. 

So like every other apartment complex in Phoenix, this one that was being built by our clients had a swimming pool. It's sort of a normal thing. You gotta have a swimming pool if you're gonna build a tower in Phoenix. And the swimming pool's on the roof in this case. 

So the client came to us and said, "What do we do? How do we sell our apartments? How do we rent out our apartments? How do we make our building the one that everybody wants to go to? We want to make a little bit more rent than everybody else on the street. We want to be the one that can be premium. We need to really understand what's gonna make people go, 'That's the building for me'."

One of the core values that was shared by everyone who thought “That building was amazing!”, was the value of creativity. That's not what you'd expect. You'd think, “Okay, people are going to choose an apartment based on location, or based on how big the suite is, or whether there's a swimming pool, or you know, all these other kinds of things.”

So we went out and did our work, our methodology. We find a stat rep of the people who are interested in moving into an apartment in downtown Phoenix, and we ask them a couple of questions, just enough that it becomes a wayfinding tool. It's a typing tool that tells us how to extrapolate the rich, contextualized data out of the benchmark study the Valuegraphics database. 

And what we found for this particular tower is that for one reason or another, we never know why. Sometimes it's obvious; in this case, it wasn't. One of the core values that was shared by everyone who thought “That building was amazing!”, was the value of creativity. That's not what you'd expect. You'd think, “Okay, people are going to choose an apartment based on location, or based on how big the suite is, or whether there's a swimming pool, or you know, all these other kinds of things.”

But creativity was driving the decision making process for the people who thought that was the tower that felt best to them, so what do we do with that? So we sat down with the real estate developer and said,”You got a whole bunch of people coming here who really appreciate creative things and see themselves as being creative people.

Some of them might be accountants or engineers, but you know what? There's a whole lot of creativity in those professions. Some of them might actually be “creative people” in that they're working in the arts or something like that. But if we expand our knowledge or idea of who creative people are, how can we change this building?

How can we do things to this building to make it a magnet for anybody who values creativity?” 

Instead, this developer just said, "This is a swimming pool for creative people when you are stuck. You're trying to figure out the next step in whatever your creative project might be. You need to go up and swim some laps. You need to get the endorphin rush. You need to release all those chemicals in your brain and get a reset. And then you're gonna be able to go back down to your suite, right here in the same building as that swimming pool, and you're gonna be more creative. You're gonna get past whatever's stopping you from moving on with the project that you're working on.” 

So the story is – all kinds of stuff happened in the entire building, but the swimming pool... We'll talk about that. Every swimming pool in every building in Phoenix gets marketed the same way as a benefit. It's like, you know, you come home from a long hard day at work, and you can go into your swimming pool, you'll meet your neighbors. It's like living in a spa 24/7, 365. How amazing to have a backyard swimming pool to relax and enjoy. And there are lounge chairs, and on the weekend there's a keg of beer, and you might meet the cute girl from down the hall. Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, all that kind of stuff is how we talk about the swimming pool. 

Instead, this developer just said, "This is a swimming pool for creative people when you are stuck. You're trying to figure out the next step in whatever your creative project might be. You need to go up and swim some laps. You need to get the endorphin rush. You need to release all those chemicals in your brain and get a reset. And then you're gonna be able to go back down to your suite, right here in the same building as that swimming pool, and you're gonna be more creative. You're gonna get past whatever's stopping you from moving on with the project that you're working on.” 

Now, in combination with putting in a dark room and a pottery studio and a few other things to really signal creativity, this building did nothing more than just change the narrative around an existing feature and make it appeal to a group of people who were looking for a building that made them feel like they're creative people. 

So there's a really nice simple example of how even just one valuegraphic data point can change simple things and make a building for a building, a product, a service, a brand, whatever, an idea, a policy, an institution can change the way it's perceived by the target audience so that they can't help themselves but be drawn towards it because humans are hardwired to chase their values. 

So you know, at the end of the story, the moral of the story is, it's really quite simple. Just give the people what they want, and now you don't have to guess what it is. We know what their values are, you know what they're looking for.

Using values to transform organizational culture

Thor - 00:18:12: 

That's such a good example and such a compelling message. Also David, my understanding is that valuegraphics can also be applied internally within organizations to help increase understanding across departments or functions. Have you seen anyone use them this way?

David - 00:18:30:  

Oh yeah, we've had a few clients. I can't name names, but so much interest, in fact, like I come from a marketing background. I never really thought about this as an internal workforce assessment tool, a human assessment tool. 

We've had so much interest and so many people asking us for this that we've started to do this work in earnest. And in fact, we're developing. I'd say we're gonna be ready in the next few months. An entirely new assessment tool that makes it even better than what we're able to do right now.

But imagine this, if you could understand for the entire workforce within an organization what their shared values are. Because remember the reason they're there, the reason they're in that job at that company is because their values brought them there. It's the only way humans make decisions is values. 

So something about what you're all about and how your work is all put together and what's going on is ringing some values bells for these people, and that's why they're there. So we can identify what those are. 

Well, now the people within the organization who are responsible for building an engaged workplace culture. Now you have the magic recipe, you have the secret ingredients. You know that, let's say it's creativity and personal growth. And I'll throw another one of the 56 values in there to make it interesting. Let's say it's personal responsibility. I like personal responsibility people. These are people who wanna be personally responsible for moving the needle and getting things done. 

How do we put incentives in place around those values? How do we structure contracts and how do we structure a workday so that people get to be creative and see themselves growing and feeling like they're personally responsible for things?

And combined with personal growth, they're looking for ways to be a better version of themselves. And if the other value is creativity, they're gonna want to do that in creative ways. So now you got a little bit of a roadmap for how do I build a culture in here that rewards those values?

How do we put incentives in place around those values? How do we structure contracts and how do we structure a workday so that people get to be creative and see themselves growing and feeling like they're personally responsible for things?

You can spend a ton of money today inside an organization throwing stuff up on the wall to see what sticks to reduce your churn. You know, you get a survey that you take with the staff and everybody says, oh, you know, the problem here is the technology sucks. So you buy everybody a new computer and they keep quitting. Or it's, you know, the problem here is, we want to be more, we want more flex time. I wanna work at home sometimes, and I wanna work in the office sometimes. Okay, cool. Flex time for everybody. And then they keep quitting because you're not getting to the core, the values that are driving what it is they're trying to do.

Are demographics really dead?

Thor - 00:21:01: 

I think that makes perfect sense. And in your new book, The Death of Demographics that came out recently, could you tell us a bit more about the book and are demographics really dead or do they still have a role to play?

David - 00:21:16: 

I think they still have a role to play, but it's a limited role. I think of them, as like “Poor old demographics, we've been asking a whole lot of them for a whole long time.” You know, we've been saying that if we know the age and income and gender and marital status and sexual preference of a group of people, we somehow know who they are. And we don't.

We just know what they are. So let's keep using them that way. I think about demographics as like anybody who's old enough to remember going to the library and actually looking in the card catalog, those drawers that came out. And you'd flip through the card catalog, and you'd find a card, and it would give you the directions for what shelf in the library the book is that you're looking for.

So demographics are like that– they're like the Dewey Decimal System of the insights world. They say, “This is the bookshelf of people here, this is the shelf of people.” Cool. But assuming that all the books on that shelf are identical to each other, that's a big flaw. And that's what we've been doing wrong.

We've been saying, “Oh great, we know what shelf it's on. So those books, they're all exactly the same. They'll respond to things in the same way.”

I think of them, as like “Poor old demographics, we've been asking a whole lot of them for a whole long time.” You know, we've been saying that if we know the age and income and gender and marital status and sexual preference of a group of people, we somehow know who they are. And we don't.

We just know what they are.

So, yeah, demographics, you know, they served a purpose historically. Way back in olden days, it was necessary for people to behave in a way that aligned with their demographic role in society. There were big penalties to pay if you were a young, 16- 17 year old man in, you know, early prehistoric times. And if you weren't out hunting and killing the dinosaurs and bringing them home to roast over the fire, then you were not holding up your part of the bargain. And women had a role and old people and rich people and young people, and those kind of demographically defined ways of reacting to the world were the system that preserved the species. 

That's how we survived because we all knew what our job was. But then along came this thing that changed all of that called technology, where suddenly we don't have to go out and kill the mastodon and bring home the mastodon steaks for dinner just because we're a young man anymore. We can kind of do whatever– we get to curate our lives however we like, largely. Still work to do in some of those demographics. But they're a legacy system that we've continued to use in ways that no longer make sense, still has some usefulness, but that legacy usefulness is no longer there. 

You think about how often this story goes like this, where you put people in a boardroom and say, “Okay, who's our target audience?” And you get a little demographic description and everybody feels, they tick the box and like, “Okay, we know who our clients are, let's go spend some money.”

Demographics are like that– they're like the Dewey Decimal System of the insights world. They say, “This is the bookshelf of people here, this is the shelf of people.” Cool. But assuming that all the books on that shelf are identical to each other, that's a big flaw. And that's what we've been doing wrong.

Let me give you a piece of data. Here, this is fun. So we built this massive data set for the world, right? 750,000 people, random strat, stratified, statistically representative samples. So we can slice and dice this in demographic ways if we want to. And so we've done that. We said, "How similar are people within a demographic cohort?”

So if you think of all the demographic cohorts you've heard of, age bands, income, marital status, number of kids, education, all of the different demographic labels. So we've looked at them across the world and said, “How similar are the people inside each of those buckets?”

In other words, how targetable are they? How useful are the insights around one of those particular demographic cohorts? And on average, this is an average, but it doesn't fluctuate that much. The people within a demographic label, a demographic cohort, are 10.5% similar. Let's round it off. That's a 90% fail if you're gonna try and target a group of people, and it's why we get so excited when we do a direct marketing campaign and we get a three and a half percent response rate and everyone's like, “Woo-hoo, three and a half percent! That's amazing. We did great!” 

Well, really what we did was we failed 97% of the time to get that 3.5% response rate because we're using demographics to target people. It's a broken tool. Now here's the other thing. 

The reason I'm really compelled to write that book and to do this work, not only is this a ridiculous legacy broken tool that no longer works to help us understand consumers, but it causes a whole lot of problems, really big problems because the longer we all sit around in our boardrooms and our conference centers and talk about people with these lenses on that say, the way to understand those people over there is to think about them based on whether they're male or female or young or old or gay or straight or black or white. The longer we keep doing that, we're just innocently, innocently, but we are perpetuating that that's the way we should look at each other, that that's how people should be thought about. And what that's doing is fueling all the fires that we're dealing with right now. These big, terrible fires that are raging around the world. Fires like racism, and sexism, and ageism, and homophobia, and dot, dot, dot. You know, the rest of that list. 

The people within a demographic label, a demographic cohort, are 10.5% similar. Let's round it off. That's a 90% fail if you're gonna try and target a group of people, and it's why we get so excited when we do a direct marketing campaign and we get a three and a half percent response rate and everyone's like, “Woo-hoo, three and a half percent! That's amazing. We did great!” 

Well, really what we did was we failed 97% of the time to get that 3.5% response rate because we're using demographics to target people. It's a broken tool.

So the sooner we can stop believing and reinforcing that demographic ideas are valid and use demographics for what they're for and what they're good at, but stop using them for things they're not good at, I think we're gonna be able to turn the volume down on a lot of these problems. 

We're gonna stop assuming that because people fit a certain demographic, they are a certain kind of person. All women are not the same, all men are not the same, black people, gay people, straight people. But the longer we keep putting people into demographic groups and typing them accordingly, the longer we're just perpetuating all those myths. 

So without getting into a huge, huge thing about all the math behind this, we know that using valuegraphic profiling to understand a target audience is as much as eight times more effective than using demographics and psychographics alone. It's an 8x. So it's really good for our business. Really, really good. Even if it's half that, even if it's a 4x or a 2x, it's still amazing. And on top of that, we get a twofer here. We get to do really well for ourselves, and we can do really well by the world if we just change the way we look at each other. That's all we gotta do is just change the way we look at each other. That's a pretty simple ask.

Opportunities for insights professionals to challenge the status quo

Thor - 00:27:42:

So many great thoughts, a lot of them challenging many of the ideas that are, I would say, established and that help us to think differently about the problems we have ahead of us. And if we talk about those opportunities that you might see to make true business impact and to challenge the status quo, what is it that you see that insights professionals should really bring with them from listening to you today?

David - 00:28:11:

Well, here's the thing. I think we've entered an entirely new economic era. I think it's not the experience economy, the sharing economy, the gig economy. I think today we live in the values economy, and the proof is all around us. 

We look at everything from social change rocking the world right now, DEI and ESG, and Black Lives Matter, and all of these things. These are groups of people standing up and saying, "Stop looking at me like a demographic, and start treating me based on my core human values. I want my values to be honored." 

That's what's going on there. And the same thing's happening when we look at the future of work and we talk about whether we should be working from home or working in the office or somewhere in between and building engaged workplace and environments. 

That's all just ways to honor people's values and figure out how do we build a world that works for what people are really all about on the inside? And we think about the future of leadership, about the soft skills required for a good leader today, about empathy and active listening. 

I think we've entered an entirely new economic era. I think it's not the experience economy, the sharing economy, the gig economy. I think today we live in the values economy, and the proof is all around us. 

And those are just ways to detect the human values of the people that you would like to have follow you. And we go into the world of commerce. We look at companies like Patagonia. There's a company that, through trial and error, over a very long period of time, has figured out what their values are and have stuck to those values. And then the biggest values-driven mic drop in history, I think, was when the founder stood up and said, "I'm going to give the company to the planet because I don't need any more money." 

That, I mean, I would hate to be the vice president of Marketing of North Face and wake up the next day and have to respond to that. Like that guy has just locked down anybody who's ever shopped at Patagonia. They're never moving. There's no stealing share from them. 

On the other hand, look at a company like Twitter. You know, the values of advertisers and users and staff are not being honored right now, and that company's in a full-on meltdown as a result. So that's pretty hard to escape.

Everything going on in the world around us right now is driven by our values. We're in the middle of a values revolution. So to answer your question, what should people take away from this?

In whatever way you decide to start this journey, I hope that today's conversation has helped you realize that this is the journey that you need to be thinking about. How do you bring values data into the insights work that you're doing? 

Keep the demographics–still necessary, keep the psychographics– still necessary, add the valuegraphics on top, and you suddenly have a better way to think about the goals we need to meet. And the goals that we should meet. 

There's a big difference, but they can both be accomplished by just changing the way we look at each other. That's, it's really very simple. It's quite complex and very simple all at the same time.

David's new book, The Death of Demographics

Thor - 00:31:14:

Lastly, your new book, The Death of Demographics, came out recently. Could you tell us a little bit more about the book?

David - 00:31:20:

So if anybody wants to learn more about valuegraphics, they should pick up a copy of my book, and I don't want this to sound like I'm trying to make money because anybody who's put a book on Amazon knows you make about 50 cents a copy. 

So you're all gonna have to buy like 20 copies, and I might have enough for a nice bottle of wine. 

But in here, the Death of Demographics, there's a bunch of stuff you might find interesting as insights professionals. First off, there's a great forward by two of my heroes, Don Peppers and Martha Rogers. You may remember the Peppers and Rogers Group from days gone by and how instrumental they were in marketing strategy and insights work, and continue to be in the consumer experience world. 

Rory Sutherland from Ogilvy wrote a blurb for me and a bunch of other really smart people. My friend Dorian, who was the head of consumer engagement over at Amazon. 

There's a quiz in here you can use. If you want to just give this little test run, there's 15 questions you can send out through SurveyMonkey or whatever device, whatever, I don't know, quiz orangutan, whatever the app is that you're using, and it'll direct you to one of 15 chapters in here that gives you everything we know about one of the 15 biggest archetypes in the dataset. So that's great really reference material. 

You can use valuegraphics without having to pay me a cent. Of course, I'd love to hear from you if you want to actually do some work together as well. You can find me on Valuegraphics.com as well. My speaker and author site for my speaking business is DavidAllisonInc.com, and I hang out most every day, all day long on LinkedIn. So I hope people will connect and say hi. 

If we can provide any other information, we'd be happy to do it. We just want the whole world to start thinking about values when they think about people.

Who David would love to have lunch with

Thor – 32:57

David, it really hurts me to realize that we've come to the end of our conversation today and I have one last question that I always ask that I love to ask, which is: Who in the world of insights would you love to have lunch with?

David - 00:33:10: 

You. 

Thor - 00:33:13: 

Okay, let's do it. 

David - 00:33:15: 

Let's do it. Let's figure this out. You know, you get to talk to some really fascinating people, and instead of me having to have lunch with all of them, I have lunch with you, and I get the benefit of all the amazing folks you've had on your show. So I think you'd be my first choice.

Summary

Thor - 00:33:30: 

I'm honored. Thank you so much. Wow, this has been such an amazing conversation. David, you have a really unique perspective on the industry, which I think we all can learn from. 

You've got me thinking about values in a completely different way now. And there's nothing more human than values. 

If I place some of the stuff you've shared back to you, I remember them as the really true driver of human behavior. We've been asking demographics to do a lot for us, and that's great because, as you said, they still have a role to play, but they do not tell us who people are. But they tell us what they are. 

For insights professionals like ourselves, valuegraphics play a key role. Without them, you are not getting to the core of what drives people, and valuegraphics can actually play a role beyond insights. 

On an org level, it can help you understand how you should incentivize and how you should create rewards that effectively are built on the values that the people are motivated by. 

Lastly, and that's something I will really bring with me on a personal level, is that well-applied, it can also help us turn the volume down on a lot of polarizing topics in today's society. I know that I've learned a lot from talking to you today, David, and I'm sure our audience has as well. Thank you so much for joining me.

David - 00:34:55: 

Thanks for having me here. And let's do it again soon and I'll look forward to that lunch date.

Thor - 00:35:00:

Let's do it.