No Shock...Values Matter When Marketing

In The Benefits of Marketing to Values Abny Santicola, assistant editor, Inside Direct Mail and Target Marketing, writes:

"According to Ken Beller, co-author of the book "The Consistent Consumer: Predicting Future Trends Through Lasting Values," understanding the cultural environment in which people's values are formed gives you a "lens of perspective" on how they view the world." (continues)

Analyzing history and the thousands of significant events that would effect the way society was behaving during a given time led the authors to see clear changes in society that caused value sets to shift. These shifts resulted in delineations that form the five value populations highlighted in the book: Patriots, Performers, Techticians, Believers and Transformers.

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Each value population is different and responds to different marketing approaches due to the events that helped shape their values, posit the authors, who suggest marketing to these values rather than past purchase behavior.

"These are emotional triggers that cause people to react," says Beller. "In any marketing and certainly in direct mail, what we're looking for is triggers. What will trigger somebody to act?" According to Beller, while past behavior can show what did trigger somebody at one point in time to make a purchase, it is not necessarily what's going to trigger them in the future. "It just happens to be a random event at times," says Beller. "As opposed to if you focus on their values and you market to their values not only in content, but in format."

"The Consistent Consumer: Predicting Future Trends Through Lasting Values" (Dearborn Trade Publishing, $25) can be purchased at www.amazon.com.