Why Values Are the Future of Data and Demographic Stereotypes Must Die

Want to understand your members better? Are demographic stereotypes destroying your organization’s future? Missing the Canadian Society of Association Executives’ Annual Meeting in Vancouver this year? Hear this interview with their opening keynote, David Allison.

After a career spent developing ideas and concepts to engage stakeholders for several hundred organizations, David Allison recognized the need for a more scientific method to determine what really influences a target audience. He worked with a university-based social scientist for two years to build the Valuegraphics Database, guided by a basic principle of sociology, psychology and consumer behavior: what we value determines what we do. 

In other words, segmenting behaviors as Generation X, Millennials, or Gen Z types of behaviors is for amateurs. The stereotypes don’t work. 

KiKi L’Italien interviewed David Allison about “Valuegraphics,” the focus of his recent book [not an affiliate link] and the research that could (should) change the way you talk to your audiences.

David knows how to undertstand, reach and motivate target audiences more effectively and efficiently.

Dorian Carroll, the VP of Mobile Shopping for Amazon

“The First 10” Association Chat interview with David features the first 10 minutes of the full podcast. 

(Patreon Patron at the $10 and above level can listen to the entire full-length interview on Monday, October 21, 2019! Everyone else will have access to highlighted clips of the interview in upcoming weeks.)

Watch for more featured content with David Allison!

My favorite part of this segment of the interview? David’s answer to my question asking what Valuegraphics is in a nutshell.

“Valuegraphics is, I like to talk about it as a replacement system for understanding how groups of people behave. Right now, the system we use is called demographic stereotypes. And instead of using demographic stereotypes like, “boys like blue,” “girls like pink,” “Millennials like avocado toast,” “Baby Boomers drive minivans.”

Instead of using that stuff which I know we can all laugh about but we kind of still believe many of those things and use them to make decisions. Instead of that, we have a system now based on this rigorous rigorous data, that helps us understand for any group of people, anywhere in the world, what do they share in common when it comes to their values? In other words, what do they care about? And if you can build your product, your service, your brand, your association membership campaign, your development work, your programming inside an association based on what you know statistically your people care about. You’re gonna be way better off than trying to guess based on how old they are or how much money they make or whether they’re male or female or have 2.3 children and live in the house with the white picket fence.”

That’s really what it boils down to, we now have a database that helps us understand the most important thing to the people that we’re trying to talk to, so that you can use that as a way to frame whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.”

Want to know more?

Transcript

  • David Allison is a best-selling author, international speaker and advisor to global organizations working in various sectors of the economy. He’s a leading advocate for values thinking as the new best practice in organizations around the world. His work has transformed philosophical conversations about shared human values into empirical data, so we can understand why people do things and how to change that behavior. His mission is to end the use of demographic stereotypes and quite simply to change the way we look at the world. I talked with David about Valuegraphics, the Valuegraphics Database and his most recent book, We Are All the Same Age Now. This is a wonderful chance I had to talk with David Allison and I hope you enjoy it. The things that I have already learned from your book, the things I’ve already learned from you are unlike anything else that I’ve really read anywhere else. And so, with that, what I wanted to do is open up with a really general question and that is, what is Valuegraphics? What is this thing?
  • Oh, that’s the big question. That’s the big one. It seems to be constantly evolving but I’ll do my best to answer. First off, thanks for having me over, it’s so fun to talk with you. Associations are such an important part of our economy in our world and I think that they have all kinds of room to become even more important and more vital to the way we all move forward. And I’m gonna digress at your question after my little digression here. Welcome to Planet David.
  • I love it.
  • The number, it kind of helps to me explain the answer to your question. But the most important value across the half-million surveys that we’ve conducted now around the world in a very very accurate academic way. The most important value that we’re all looking for, here in North America, is to belong. That’s what we all want. We want more belonging. We don’t wanna go to some other yoga studio than the one we normally go to because I don’t belong there. I wanna belong at work, I want people around me who make me feel like I belong. Belongingness is the thing we’re all hunting for. And what can associations provide to us from the perspective of this aspect of our lives that we spend, some of us, 16 hours a day with our work, our career, our calling. And an association is a way to weave belongingness into that piece of our life. So, I think associations have not only an outward-facing amazingly important role to play here, but also just helping us all feel like we belong and that’s amazing. So, to answer your question, what is Valuegraphics? Valuegraphics is, I like to talk about it as a replacement system for understanding how groups of people behave. Right now, the system we use is called demographic stereotypes. And instead of using demographic stereotypes like, boys like blue, girls like pink, Millennials like avocado toast, Baby Boomers drive minivans. Instead of using that stuff which I know we can all laugh about but we kind of still believe many of those things and use them to make decisions. Instead of that, we have a system now based on this rigorous rigorous data, that helps us understand for any group of people, anywhere in the world, what do they share in common when it comes to their values? In other words, what do they care about? And if you can build your product, your service, your brand, your association membership campaign, your development work, your programming inside an association based on what you know statistically your people care about. You’re gonna be way better off than trying to guess based on how old they are or how much money they make or whether they’re male or female or have 2.3 children and live in the house with the white picket fence. That’s really what it boils down to, we now have a database that helps us understand the most important thing to the people that we’re trying to talk to, so that you can use that as a way to frame whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.
  • How did you pull this database together?
  • Well, that’s been, That’s been a labor of love for the last four years. We’ve gone out using social media channels which are really nothing more than a way to target messages to very specific groups of people. That’s what social media is. You go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram and they give you the ability to target advertising messages to very very precise groups of people. So, we use that same targeting precision to put surveys in front of all the people that we wanted to talk to, so that we could create not just a database of half a million survey responses but a database of half million survey responses that mimics identically the proportions of the real world. So, we have the same number of 22 year olds, the same number of men, the same number of women, the same number of people who are black and white and live in rural versus urban locations, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. We have our own miniaturize, I call it like our LEGO model of the world. And so, when we extract data from this, it’s so accurate, it’s, I’m gonna refine some stats here but any statisticians who are listening will enjoy this, it’s a plus or minus 3.5% level of accuracy and a 95% level of confidence around that level of accuracy. And it’s 500,000 surveys, 152 languages and 180 countries. So, this thing has never been built before and it’s this massive database that can precisely identify what people care about for anything, anywhere in the world.
  • And you found that this, when you look at this, the data that’s pulled in, that it’s really showing that the way that we have been using demographics in the past is not doing us any favors. So, can you talk to me a little bit about that? Because, I’m sure at the very beginning of it, you have the suspicion that, you know, what you find is going to show a little bit more of nuance than the “people born between these years make these types of choices.” Can you talk to me a little bit about what you found since you’ve done this research?
  • Yeah, let me just put it in a bit of context for you, you know, I used to run, I had my own marketing firm. And then, what we did was specialize particularly in high-end real estate development. So, condo towers that someone was spending 400, 500 million dollars to build this condo tower. And those were our clients, those folks who’d come to us and say, how are we gonna get people to buy all these condos? And we did this all over North America and into Europe and all over the place. And so, we’d sit down, we’d come up with the idea of who we thought the buyers were, invariably based on demographics and a little bit of psychographics because that’s all we had to work with. And then we go and spend millions of dollars to help this person who’s putting this tower together, figure out how to attract folks and I call them, just as a funny way to talk about this, I said, we’ve been wasting all of our money on Bob and Sally. Because invariably it was Bob and Sally that we were selling to. And we knew that they were, for instance, downsizing Baby Boomers moving out of their homes in the suburbs and the kids had all, you know, flown the coop, and they’re by the pre-retirement or just into retirement and they were looking to put some cash in their pocket and realize some equity from the family home and blah, blah, blah, et cetera. And we got into like, what cars are they driving? And what clothing brands? We had this huge profile of who these people were. And we’d make million-dollar decisions based on that stuff. And then, two years later, we go to the grand opening of the condo tower. And we’d look around and there wasn’t a single person in the room who matched that description. Nobody showed up that we’ve been talking to, oh, there may have been a one or two there that were an outlier. But somehow, a bunch of people found this building and bought everything. They had nothing to do with the description we put together in advance of who we thought we were talking to and how we were spending all that money. That was the spark of why we started to do this and since then, now we have the data, we can look back and go, well, we understand what was going on there. What was going on, is we were making decisions based on demographic stereotypes.
  • [cue the music]
  • Well, that’s the first 10 minutes with David Allison, my guest, talking about Valuegraphics. If you wanna listen to part two, join the mailing list to the associationchat.com or become a Patreon patron and you’ll receive all of the content that I push out and more before everybody else does. We are doing a little test and we’re going to release bits of these podcast interviews, bits at the time. So, if you really loved this interview with David Allison, let me know on the socials. Tweet me @kikilitalien. Use the hashtag A-S-S-N-C-H-A-T (#ASSNCHAT). Make sure that we know that this is the type of content you love. See you next time.

Full Interview Transcript

KiKi L’Italien: Welcome to Association Chat, a podcast devoted to talking about all things associations, non-profits, and the future for building communities. In a world where there’s an association for everything, that gives us a lot to talk about. So let’s get started with your host, Kiki L’Italien.

KiKi L’Italien: Thank you, [inaudible 00:00:24], at Podcasting For Associations for the production of this podcast.

KiKi L’Italien: He’s going to change the way you ask questions and change the way you look at the people you lead. Oh my gosh. This episode with David Allison rocked my world, and I think it’s going to rock yours too.

KiKi L’Italien: He is thought of as a data pioneer, and he is a pioneer in changing the way that you look at demographics. Did we know that generations, when we define people by generations, that we’re being stereotypical? Well, we do now. And I think you’re going to change the way that you market after you hear this.

KiKi L’Italien: All right. Just to lead us into this, David Allison, I have only had fascinating conversations with you so far ever since [Tahira 00:01:20] introduced us. I am so excited to be talking with you today because this whole study of this thing called valuegraphics is, I think, going to just rock marketing. It’s going to rock product development. It’s going to rock the way that we think about the way that we think about people. And especially when I look at associations with Association Chat and everything, I’m always focused on associations, we have to be masters of understanding the people who belong to our organizations.

KiKi L’Italien: So that’s why I’m so excited to be talking with you today because the things that I have already learned from your book, the things I’ve already learned from you are unlike anything else that I’ve really read anywhere else. And so, with that, what I wanted to do was open up with a really general question, and that is, what is valuegraphics? What is this thing?

David Allison: Oh, that’s the big question. That’s the big one. It seems to be constantly evolving, but I’ll do my best to answer. First off, thanks for having me over. It’s so fun to talk with you. Associations are such an important part of our economy in our world. And I think that they have all kinds of room to become even more important and more vital to the way we all move forward. And I’m going to digress and answer the question after my little digression here. Welcome to Planet David.

KiKi L’Italien: I love it. [inaudible 00:02:59].

David Allison: It kind of helps. It kind of helps me explain the answer to your question. But the most important value across the half million surveys that we’ve conducted now around the world, in very, very accurate academic way, the most important value that we’re all looking for here in North America is to belong. That’s what we all want. We want more belonging. We don’t want to go to some other yoga studio than the one we normally go to, because I don’t belong there. I want to belong at work. I want people around me who make me feel like I belong. Belongingness is the thing we’re all hunting for.

David Allison: What can associations provide to us from the perspective of this aspect of our lives that we spend, some of us, 16 hours a day with our work, our career, our calling? And then association is a way to weave belongingness into that piece of our life. So I think associations have, not only an outward-facing, amazingly important role to play here, but also just helping us all feel like we belong. And that’s amazing.

David Allison: To answer your question, what is valuegraphics, valuegraphics, I like to talk about it as a replacement system for understanding how groups of people behave. Right now the system we use is called demographic stereotypes. And instead of using demographic stereotypes like boys like blue, girls like pink, millennials like avocado toast, baby boomers drive mini vans, instead of using that stuff, which I know we can all laugh about. But we kind of still believe many of those things and use them to make decisions. Instead of that, we have a system now based on this rigorous, rigorous data that helps us understand, for any group of people anywhere in the world, what do they share in common when it comes to their values. In other words, what do they care about?

David Allison: If you can build your product, your service, your brand, your association, membership campaign, your development work, your programming inside an association, based on what you know statistically your people care about, you’re going to be way better off than trying to guess based on how old they are or how much money they make, or whether they’re male or female or have 2.3 children and live in a house with a white picket fence.

David Allison: That’s really what it boils down to. We now have a database that helps us understand the most important thing to the people that we’re trying to talk to, so that you can use that as a way to frame whatever it is you’re trying to accomplish.

KiKi L’Italien: How did you pull this database together?

David Allison: Well, that’s been a labor of love for the last four years. We’ve gone out using social media channels, which are really nothing more than a way to target messages to very specifically groups of people. That’s what social media is. You go to Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Instagram, and they give you the ability to target advertising messages to very, very precise groups of people. So we use that same targeting precision to put surveys in front of all the people that we wanted to talk to, so that we could create, not just a database of half a million survey responses, but a database of half a million survey responses that mimics identically the proportions of the real world.

David Allison: So we have the same number of 22-year olds, the same number of men, the same number of women, the same number of people who are Black, and White, and live in rural versus urban locations, etc., etc., etc. We have our own miniaturized… I call it our Lego model of the world. So when we extract data from this, it’s so accurate. It’s riff on some stats here, but any statisticians who are listening will enjoy this. It’s a plus or minus 3.5% level of accuracy and a 95% level of confidence around that level of accuracy. And it’s 500,000 surveys, 152 languages, in 180 countries. This thing has never been built before, and it’s this massive database that can precisely identify what people care about for anything anywhere in the world.

KiKi L’Italien: And you found that, when you look at this, the data that’s pulled in, that it’s really showing that the way that we have been using demographics in the past, is not doing us any favors. Can you talk to me a little bit about that because I’m sure, at the very beginning of it, you have the suspicion that what you find is going to show a little bit more of a nuance than just people born between these years make these types of choices. But can you talk to me a little bit about what you’ve found since you’ve done this research?

David Allison: Yeah. Let me just put it in a bit of context for you. I had my own marketing firm. And what we did was specialize particularly in high-end real estate development, so condo towers that someone was spending 400, 500 million dollars to build this condo tower. And those were our clients. Those folks would come to us and say, “How are we going to get people to buy all these condos? We did this all over North America and into Europe, and all over the place.

David Allison: And so, we’d sit down. We’d come up with idea of who we thought the buyers were, invariably based on demographics and a little bit of psychographics, because that’s all we had to work with. Then we’d go and spend millions of dollars to help this person who’s putting this tower together figure out how to attract folks. Just as a funny way to talk about this, I say we’ve been wasting all of our money on Bob and Sally, because invariably it was Bob and Sally that we were selling to. And we knew that they were, for instance, downsizing baby boomers moving out of their homes in the suburbs and they had lost… The kids had all flown the coop and they’re either pre retirement or just into retirement and they were looking to put some cash in some pocket and realize some equity from the family home and blah, blah, blah, etc.

David Allison: We got into what cars they’re driving, and what clothing brands… We had this huge profile of who these people were. And we’d make million-dollar decisions based on that stuff. Then two years later, we’d go to the grand opening of the condo tower and we’d look around. And there wasn’t a single person in the room who matched that description. Nobody showed up that we’d been talking to. Now, there may have been one or two that were an outlier, but somehow a whole bunch of people found this building and bought everything, that had nothing to do with the description we’d put together in advance of who we thought we were talking to, and how were spending all our money. That was the spark of why we started to do this.

David Allison: Since then, now we have the data. We can look back and go, “Well, we understand what was going on there.” What was going on is we were making decisions based on demographic stereotypes. If Bob and Sally are early 50s, clearly they’re going to like X. They come from the suburbs and they’re looking forward to being downtown. So that means they’re going like Y. And we’d have all these assumptions made… We’d never met a Bob or Sally. Bob and Sally didn’t exist.

David Allison: Now what we can do instead is say, “These people who are going to come and live in this building, what they care about is family, the environment, and let’s say, trust. And based on those three things, we can build a building for them, or a product or service or brand and association that we know is actually going to resonate with what they care about.

David Allison: The numbers that have come out of this database since we’ve started working with this enormous pile of survey responses are startling. We look at demographic cohesion, let’s call it, demographic alignment within different sectors, different segments of the world. Let’s talk about baby boomers, for a moment. What we’ve measured around the world are how often baby boomers agree with each other around 420 different things.

David Allison: Now, those 420 different things are what they value, what they care about the most, and then what they want and need and expect around those values. So if one of your values is family, that’s super important to you, it’s a filter you use to make all your decisions, knowing what you want and need and expect for your family helps me even understand better what it is family is doing as a tool you use to make decisions.

David Allison: So, backing up here, if we just isolate baby boomers and say, “How often do they agree with each other on all 420 things, the sort of DNA blueprint of what it is to be a human being, baby boomers only agree with each other 13% of the time. Which means 87% of the time, baby boomers disagree on everything. So if you’re spending your money trying to target baby boomers, you can’t. You get it? You can’t. And that holds true for every demographic segment out there.

David Allison: We looked at Generation X, only agrees 11% of the time. This one’s my favorite. Millennials, those unicorns in the enchanted forest that we’re supposed to change the world for, millennials only agree with each other 15% of the time. And to make those numbers even more remarkable… So we have 15% for millennials, 11% for Generation X, and 13% for baby boomers. But, you know what, just because we’re human, we all agree with each other about-

KiKi L’Italien: Oh my gosh.

David Allison: … 8% of the time anyway. So subtract 8% from each one of those numbers I’ve just given you. And that’s how much of a lift you’re getting for using those demographic segments as a way to target your messages, figure out your programs, your brands, your recruitment, your development, everything that you’re trying to do.

KiKi L’Italien: Just to put that into context for people who are listening, think about how many… I’m thinking about how many presentations I listen to that focus on generations, like, “Here, understand this generation.” I mean, keynotes and all of this stuff where the whole focus is on, let me tell you about the unicorns in the forest, the millennials, and thinking that… Well, what kind of lift are you getting from really understanding them, because you’re not-

David Allison: It’s negligible.

KiKi L’Italien: Yeah, yeah. You’re not really getting that much closer to any sort of meaningful understanding of-

David Allison: No. And if you just stand back and look at it and say… Okay, filled up stadium with 10,000 millennials, and now try and tell me that everybody, now that we’ve got a real picture in our head, of 10,000 millennials in a stadium, you’re going to stand in the middle of that stadium and you get to pitch them on a product or service or brand, what’s the one thing you’re going to say that they’re all going to go, “Yeah, that sounds great.”

KiKi L’Italien: Apparently, we have avocado toast, and that’s about it.

David Allison: Yeah, exactly. That’s about it, or being shiftless or living in their parents’ basements and watching too much Netflix and can’t hold down a job. I mean, for goodness sakes, millennials are 39 years old, the oldest ones this year. They’re mid-management now. They’re vice presidents of major corporations. They’re not that thing we have in our head about millennials. And so, what’s happening really, unfortunately, is we’re all starting to just… I can see the social media monster online is just starting to calm down around millennials and sharpen its teeth again and get ready to go attack Gen Z.

KiKi L’Italien: Yes. Exactly. Exactly.

David Allison: Like, “It’s time to go get those guys. Some fresh meat’s come around. Let’s go start this all over.” It drives me crazy when I go to a conference as a speaker, and I look at who else is speaking. And everybody is a millennial expert. It happens so often. “Here’s what millennials need from an HR perspective. Here’s what millennials need from a-

KiKi L’Italien: I know. It’s a marketing thing. Somebody actually gave me the advice… I think I shared this with you the first time we spoke. Someone actually gave me advice about some of my speaking topics and said, “You just need to figure out some kind of generational bend to it because you’re going to get hired more.” But it’s wrong.

David Allison: But it’s wrong.

KiKi L’Italien: I mean, it’s just wrapping it up in something. What are we trying to push? Is it really going to get people closer to what they’re trying to achieve or get people closer to the end goal? The answer, it turns out, is no. If they want to get closer, it’s really about understanding more about what their values are. So I wanted to ask you, what are the values? How did you arrive at the values? How did you figure out how to even ask people which values that they care the most about? Talk to me about that.

David Allison: Okay. Those are a bunch of questions, and I’m trying to-

KiKi L’Italien: I know. I know. I just threw like five.

David Allison: It’s okay.

KiKi L’Italien: Pick one.

David Allison: That’s a wide open door I can walk through.

KiKi L’Italien: I know.

David Allison: First off, where did the values come from? We started with a list from the World Values Index, the Bhutan, Gross Domestic Happiness Index, some proven social science tools that we looked at and said, “Okay. What are the lists they’re using?” These are lists that obviously the social science world agrees with. And these are established measurement devices that are out there and they’re doing their job. So we built our list based on those. It’s pretty darn close to the World Values Index, but a couple little things that we tweaked a bit to make ourselves happy. And that’s 40 things. Then we started asking other questions around those 40 things like I’ve mentioned, around wants, and needs, and expectations.

David Allison: The way we found out the answers to this stuff is, again, through social media. Here’s an example I use in my book. If you are on Facebook and you’ve been talking about how much you love hockey, and we need another person who fits your demographic profile, to go into our benchmark study, because as I’d mentioned, this benchmark study is an exact replica proportionately of the real world, and we’re low on one person who fits your description. We’re going to show you a little… It looks like an ad that comes up on your Facebook page that says, “Hey, we’re trying to understand people who love hockey and what makes hockey so interesting. Would you help us out?

David Allison: That’s pretty hard not to click on if you’re a hockey fan. So you click through, and we limit ourselves to about 10 questions. We ask you things like… First off, we’ll confirm who you are, male, female, age, blah, blah, blah, whatever. We already know that because you’re on social media and that’s part of your profile. So we’re pretty sure we know who we’re talking to. And we’ve chosen you because we need more people like you.

David Allison: Then we ask you a few questions about hockey. But they’ll be questions like this. You have a favorite team? Of course, I do. If your team is knocked out of the season after the second game in the series, would you change and start cheering for another team? Sure I would. I love hockey, and it’s not about the team. It’s about loving hockey and enjoying the season. Okay, cool. Do you watch television games? Yes. Do you go to games live? When you watch them on TV, does your family join in? Are your friends over? When you go to a live game, do you bring your family? Do you bring your friends? Do you drink? Do you drink too much? Do you have a jersey? Do you own a water bottle? Just on and on and on about hockey.

David Allison: So you’re telling me the answers to all these questions and you’re having a great time talking about this thing that you like the most in the world, which is hockey. But really what you’re telling me about is family, and loyalty, and relationships, and friendships, and leisure time, and priorities, and all these things that if I just asked you how important is your family, you’d say… Everybody will say, “They’re super important,” even if you hate your family. But by asking you these indirect questions, I like to call them questions that come in the back door, we can find out how you really feel by couching these questions in the blanket of your own interests.

David Allison: That’s how we’ve been able to collect this very, very accurate data around people and how they truly feel about things they’re most interested in. And then we’ve taken that and put it into a quantitative dataset so that we’re now able to extract specifics around various people or groups of people based on their shared interests in this quantitative… It’s called qual quant data. So we take qualitative answers, code them, and make them into quantitative data so we can extract, with a great degree of accuracy, anything we need to know about a group of people. Did I answer your question? I know I told you a long story, by the way.

KiKi L’Italien: It does.

David Allison: I got there? Okay.

KiKi L’Italien: No, it’s so… In your book, you have sort of a sample test. It’s something that you can give to people that is 10 questions. I did this for my Association Chat folks. Obviously, it’s not as in-depth, and all of this stuff is as… the research that you do. But it gives you a taste for, in general, the values of whatever groups that you’re working with. And gives you an idea of the types of questions that might be included in this sort of thing.

KiKi L’Italien: For me, it was really, really interesting to see the information coming in, because I did start to see some trends about values, especially around things like technology and stuff, and helpful view. And I actually have to go back and see what the latest results are because I’ve been letting it run for the past, I think, two weeks maybe. I haven’t checked it in the past few days.

KiKi L’Italien: I looked at those questions and I thought, “Well, some of them seem similar, but there is something about it that makes you make a decision. There’s something about it that you are making a deeper decision than you maybe realize on the surface. And so, I really think it’s remarkable the work that you’ve done here. Did any of the feedback… What surprised you about the data that started coming in when you started seeing this go for a little while and started to see some trends emerge? Was there anything that surprised you?

David Allison: Oh gosh. I get surprised every day.

KiKi L’Italien: Really?

David Allison: What to talk about? First, let’s just touch on that test. So, yes, in my book, which was released a year ago and is already so out of date because we’ve collected so much new data, there is a free test you can use to figure out whatever audience you’re interested in, which of the 10 biggest [inaudible 00:22:01] types in the dataset is most applicable. I like to say it’s like playing the piano with your fists. It helps you start to think about values. It’s not super scientific, but at least you’re playing the piano, even if you’re really clapping at it. You’re playing the piano, right? You’re not over there playing the oboe or something else that you shouldn’t be playing.

KiKi L’Italien: You’re getting in the territory. Right. Right.

David Allison: Yeah. Exactly. So I’m glad you did that, and I can’t wait to hear what your results were. But your question about what surprised me, I think there was some things that I found very hopeful for the future of the human race. One of them in particular was that the top… And this is the North American dataset I’ll talk about right now. The top three or four values in order for everybody in North America are all about togetherness. They’re all about that old line about No Man is an Island, right? Neither is any woman, that we all have to have other people around us, and that’s the only way forward.

David Allison: We need to feel like we belong, and that expresses itself and manifests itself in various ways like community, family, friendship, relationships, or this big umbrella one for some people about belongingness. And they don’t really discern where that comes from. It could be from work friends or any number of sources. But there’s this driving human need to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

David Allison: And I find that very, very hopeful in these divisive times that we’re living through right now where we’re so busy trying to figure out who’s the other guy, and who I’m supposed to not like, and who are my against, that there’s still this driving human need to be amongst others and want to be part of things. So I guess if you want to get philosophical about it is maybe partly why we’re having this divisiveness is that our group versus your group is happening.

David Allison: But I don’t know. I just found it really, really… I found it very heartfelt and hopeful that belongingness in all its various forms was the number one thing across the whole dataset. We find cool, weird little outliers when we profile specific companies, or brands, or have specific projects we’re working on, things like… So your audience, this is what they’re all about. And they’re partly a workaholic, and they have these characteristics around their workaholism. They’re workaholics not just because they want status, but because they want family and etc, etc, etc, etc.

David Allison: And by the way, they hate vegetables. Really. It’s crazy little outlying things. We had one group we profiled and they all like playing musical instruments, like, “Oh, that has nothing to do with what we’re talking about,” but how weird that they all play musical instruments. Or wine. That was another one that came up. We were talking about a group that had nothing to do with each other. It had everything to do with each other, and nothing to do with wine. But they all like wine a lot. So we find these funny little things that are, I mean, from a marketing perspective pretty useful-

KiKi L’Italien: Oh, extremely.

David Allison: … to know that you’ve got that kind of [inaudible 00:25:12].

KiKi L’Italien: Yeah. Every event planner would love to know this, because if you’re trying to figure out what type of events, networking types of things to offer at your conferences, you’re thinking, “Oh, well, obviously if most of the people tend to like wine and stuff like that, your wine tastings, your wine…” Anything with that would be, let’s do it, because it’s going to hit the target with a lot of our people. How interesting is that?

David Allison: It’s phenomenal.

KiKi L’Italien: And you know-

David Allison: And now we’re starting to compare and contrast various regions of the world. We’ve got our global dataset done as of about, oh gosh, well, four months ago. We’re diving in now and just swimming around in data and looking to see what’s going on in China and in Asia Pacific, and in the European Union, and all these other parts of the world, and comparing and contrasting and seeing what’s happening. So here’s just one little story from there that I find really interesting.

David Allison: I’m off next week to speak to a bunch of different groups. So excited about this. We’re going to the Middle East, Abu Dhabi and Dubai, talking to shopping center people and talking to a group of businessmen from sort of a Chamber of Commerce thing, doing a Ted-style talk there. I’m doing all these other things. So I’ve been digging into the Middle East data. We’d previously done some work around Chinese consumers, so I’ve got Chinese data in my head. And of course North American data because that was the first dataset we built and the one I know the best.

David Allison: So I’ve mentioned already that North America, the primary value, the number one thing for most people is some of togetherness, belongingness, something like that. In China, the number one value across the board for that entire population is family. And until family is settled and in a good place as far as you as an individual are concerned, no other values matter. That was a different thing from North America, where we can be equally concerned and wrapped up in three or four different values at a time, where in China, it’s family and nothing else until family is all good. Then we move on and start thinking about other values.

David Allison: Not only is the value at the top very different, but the structure of how those values impact our decision making is very different too. Then, to add something even more interesting, which I hope a whole bunch of people that I’m going to be speaking to in the Middle East are not listening, because I’m giving away my big surprise. The top of the values hierarchy for the Middle East is morality.

KiKi L’Italien: Wow.

David Allison: Now, I don’t mean this in a judgy way but morality doesn’t even show up on the top 40 in North America. I’m serious. Now, we may have other words for it-

KiKi L’Italien: That’s awful and kind of funny, but really awful.

David Allison: It is. Part of this is that people self-define things, right?

KiKi L’Italien: Yeah.

David Allison: So there may just be other words being used in North America, other values that are being pointed to when in the Middle East there’s a very clear understanding of what the word morality means. And it’s an easier way to talk to us about. I don’t know. We’ll find that out as we dig deeper. But there’s three parts of the world where a very lovely value is at the top of the list, and they’re very different. But at the same time, they’re also very much the same.

David Allison: We have China with family, the Middle East with morality, and here in North America, belongingness, I mean, how good that those nice, poetic, lovely thoughts are on the top of mind for everybody in three major parts of the world. And I’m sure that that trend will… I doubt very much, as we look at the other data for the other parts of the world, we’re going to find one part of the world where their primary focus is nastiness or something.

KiKi L’Italien: That’s the world that doesn’t get a lot of tourism, I’m guessing.

David Allison: Yeah.

KiKi L’Italien: Okay. So you’re talking about going to these amazing places. And I can’t even imagine traveling to the Middle East to talk about some of the results of this work that you’ve done, and this research that you’re constantly working on and discovering more about, when you go and you speak to these different groups, how are you talking about your research? From what I understand, you are customizing what you’ve found about these places that you’re talking to, and basically giving them some of this research that you’ve done very specific to what they do. Is that true? Is that what is going on? How do you work with people?

David Allison: Yeah. Well, I, for a little while tried to start this as a thing when I was talking online about #everyspeechiscustom, right? I’ve been to a bunch of speaking… I’ve listened to a bunch of podcasts about how to be a great speaker, and I’ve been doing some things and training and stuff. And they all say, “Okay. So you want to get your two or three speeches ready, and you swap out a slide or two. Then you just pull out speech number two and stuff in the slide that says the name of the group you’re talking to. And off you go. You’ve got a customized speech.”

David Allison: I’m just shaking my head at how silly and stupid I am because every time I give a speech, I mean, sure there’s a little bit at the beginning that explains what valuegraphics is, but the bulk of the speech is sharing the data we found for that particular group of people sitting in the room, and the folks that they are trying to engage with.

David Allison: For example, if I was talking to a group of, well, let’s say people who run associations. I’d be able to say, “Oh, right here in this region that you guys represent, we’ve gone into the dataset and we’ve pulled profiles for people who belong to associations. And here is what they actually care about.” So now that we know what they actually care about, you can start thinking about your programming, your membership drives, your recruitment, your retention strategies, your pricing models, based on what they care about, instead of based on what you think they might enjoy, or that you think they might respond to based on the information that you have at hand at the moment, which I bet is probably a bunch of demographic information, and then some psychographic information.

David Allison: My definition of psychographics is how people have behaved around a particular issue up until now. So you might have information about these people in my list of members have been members for more than 10 years. These people have been members for less than six months. My churn rate is X and it cost me X dollars to get a new member. And you might have all that kind of stuff, which is good to know. But none of that, the demographics or the psychographics, are going to help you understand how to influence people and how to predict their behavior, and how to change the way that they’re interacting with you, so that they’re feeling that they get better value out of their membership.

David Allison: That’s what we can provide, and it’s what we do. Every audience we stand in front of and say, “Here’s what you need to know to go do your jobs better.” Maybe I’m doing this all wrong and giving stuff away that I should be charging a lot of money for. But I honestly am more concerned that everyone I interact with in any way ends up understanding how… I don’t know any other better way to say this than how divisive and broken demographics are as a tool to understand our audiences, and how much more powerful and impactful and positive values are.

David Allison: I gave you a few stats earlier about boomers only agree with each other 13% of the time, millennials 15% of the time, Generation X, 11. And that the same numbers, same kind of quantities, same percentages hold true if we look at just men, just women, married, single, divorced, widowed, income levels, it’s all the same. They’re all about the same. But if we start profiling groups based on what they share in common, what their values are, we get those numbers. There was agreement around the 420 metrics in a database. They go up as high as 89%. So instead of spending a buck and getting a 13% ROI, you spend a buck and you get an 89% ROI because you know exactly what people are going to be motivated by, how you can connect with them around the things they’re actually concerned with.

KiKi L’Italien: That is-

David Allison: That’s what we’re talking about here. This is an 8X multiplier. And you don’t have to buy [inaudible 00:33:56] equipment. There’s no training. There’s no… it’s just, look at the world differently and you can be eight times more impactful. That’s what it boils down to.

KiKi L’Italien: That is remarkable. I mean, when you think about how much more effective it must… I think if I were you, it would drive me insane to have to even listen to someone talking about how to use demographics in marketing or something. It would be very difficult to not jump in on that conversation, say, “Stop. Stop, please. Stop the madness now.

David Allison: I do that sometimes when I’m in a crabby mood. I’ll get on the LinkedIn and just try and terror strick off somebody who’s on LinkedIn talking smack about millennials or whatever. I got into a funny fight on Twitter the other day with a woman. I won’t mention her name because she’s already angry enough. She had written a story for the Atlantic, which is a very respectable, very, very high-end magazine. It was all about how a particular clothing store had filed for bankruptcy and was insolvent. She was saying how it was millennials are like this now, and they didn’t read that. And Gen Z is like this now, and they didn’t see that. And that’s why they went into bankruptcy.

David Allison: So I got Twitter and I was like… At first, I tried to email her and her email address was impossible to find. So I guess she kind of brought it on herself by not making herself available. So on Twitter I found her and I said, “Listen, that story. Really interesting, but you know generational stereotypes are absolutely inaccurate and have no relevance to why anything has happened. You can’t blame a generation for what went down with this particular clothing brand.

David Allison: And oh my gosh, was she angry. She just lashed out at me and said, “You’re just trying to promote your work. Oh my gosh. Why are you picking on journalists?” I mean, she was just lashing out in every way she could because someone had dared to ask why she was using generational stereotypes. “I have to use generational stereotypes in order to make my point.” Wait a minute here. You have to use generational stereotypes to make your point? Really? You have to use inaccurate, horrible, divisive, nasty, discriminatory stereotypes to make your point as a journalist? Really?

David Allison: I kept offering her free data. I said, “Hey, let’s take this offline so I’m not freaking you out. I’ll give you free data about this any time you want.” She refused. She just went at me and was like, “[inaudible 00:36:44].” Yeah. Sometimes it backfires, but-

KiKi L’Italien: It is.

David Allison: It’s so pervasive how much a part of everything we do and think, and it’s all around you. Once you have your generational stereotyping lenses on, you see it everywhere. You see it everywhere. And if you take it beyond generational stereotyping and just say, “What about demographic stereotyping in its largest sense?” And watch for instances where people are saying, well, men, this, and women, that, or people who earn $250,000, rich people, this, and poor people that, or people who have an MBA or a master’s degree in something, and people who don’t and have an undergraduate degree or never finished high school. They’re like this. It’s all wrong.

David Allison: And it’s all so discriminatory when we stand back and look at what we’re doing. We’re creating groups of people that have nothing in common with each other, other than one fact. Then from that one fact, let’s say people who didn’t finish high school, we’re drawing all kinds of conclusions about who they are, what they believe, how they’re going to behave, what influences them, what doesn’t, just because they didn’t finish high school. That’s nuts.

KiKi L’Italien: Right. Yeah. It’s so refreshing, and it makes so much sense. But it’s so refreshing to think about grouping people together according to what they care about, versus when they were born, or what gender they are, or whatever, because for the longest time, you would look at that and you’re like, “Oh, I’ve got to add this,” and then you throw in some psychographics if you can get them. I guess I have one last question before we wrap things up, and that is, for people who are wanting to take the next step, they say, “You know what, I want to find out more about this. I want to do something. I want to get this kind of data for my people.” What should they do? What should their very next step be to get on the right path?

David Allison: If you don’t mind, I’m going to answer that question by starting with a story. And then I’ll give you specific information. This story is the moment when I’m speaking… When I’m talking to a friend, I tell this short little story. And this is when the light bulb goes on. We’ve talked about all kinds of things in our time together today. And I hope that this one little story is what sticks with people because I think it’s the most powerful way I’ve come up with to talk about it. It’s called Three Friends in an Alley at Midnight. Here’s the story.

David Allison: Three friends are out having a drink. They haven’t seen each other in a long time, their favorite bar. And they’re laughing and telling jokes, and they have one drink too many. It’s midnight now. It’s time to leave. So they’re walking down the street. They’re still laughing and being noisy and having a good time like old friends do after they’ve had a few too many drinks. And they suddenly turn a corner and there’s a dark alley. And now they have to make a decision. Are we going to go down that alley or not?

David Allison: Friend number one, all we know about friend number one is the primary value for friend number one is adventure. And of course this friend thinks it’s the smartest idea in the world to go down that alley because we’re friends, we’re together. We don’t see each other very much. We’ve had a few drinks. All kinds of cool stuff could happen if we go down that alley. I will be a wonderful way to end the evening.

David Allison: Then we move to friend number two. All we know about friend number two is that their primary value is safety. And all they care about is with my friends who I’m out with, that I don’t get to see very often, who I love very much, I want to get out of here. I want to be safe. The last thing we should do is go down that alley. Let’s go back to the bar where there’s lights and other people.

David Allison: Friend number three. All we know about friend number three is that their primary value is friendship, and they don’t really care whether we go down the alley or go back to the bar, as long as we stick together, because that’s what’s important. Now those three people, in the same situation, the same moment in time, they obviously share some things in common. But they’re making their decision about what’s the right way to move forward here entirely based on their values. None of them checked in to see if they were male or female.

David Allison: I purposely told the story in a way that didn’t identify if they were young or old, if they were rich or poor, or educated or not. None of that matters. The only way we make decisions in this world, in this life, is based on what we value. What we value determines what we do. So if you’re intrigued and you want to follow through how to do this, there’s a few ways you can do that.

David Allison: The first thing, if you just want to dip your toe in the water is follow me on LinkedIn. It’s David Allison. If you just do a hashtag for valuegraphics, you’ll find me all over the place. It’s one word, by the way. You can go to my website at valuegraphics.com. And under the news tab, constantly posting new data reports and information that we find when we work with different groups. We just share it, because we’re on a mission to try and get everybody to start thinking valuegraphically instead of demographically about their work and their lives.

David Allison: You can buy my book, which is outdated by a year. We only had 75,000 surveys when we wrote it. We now have half a million. But in that book, there is a free test that you can use to pull your audience and figure out what their primary values are based just on the top 10 profiles that are in the dataset. There’s potentially hundreds of thousands of profiles.

David Allison: And for the big kahuna, if you really want to go for it, you can talk to us and commission a custom study, or hire me to come and do a keynote for you and we’ll pull custom data specific to your situation and share that with you. But one way or the other, if the only thing people remember after listening to us today is that demographics are broken, and then really what’s important, the best way, best practice for us all to move forward, not just for our organizations in our work, but as a society and as humankind is to just start thinking about what we share in common, what our values are, and what we all really care about.

KiKi L’Italien: Wow, David Allison, you have been such a pleasure to talk to today. And you have honestly been such a provocateur for my own thinking on this topic. And I’m sure that will continue to be provocative for people around the world who are having a chance to listen to you and think differently about the way that they reach their people, that they consider who their people are, what they care about. And I would be very interested to find out in a year from now, what happens next with you.

KiKi L’Italien: So thank you so much for talking with Association Chat today, for talking with me. I value your time and your expertise greatly, and I look forward to seeing what you do next.

David Allison: Thank you. I really appreciate the opportunity to talk to your community, and I hope I’ve been helpful. Thanks for the time. It was great.

KiKi L’Italien: All right. Great. Thanks for listening to this episode of Association Chat. If you like it, please subscribe. Or better yet, tell a friend. You can join the Association Chat Book Club or support Association Chat by visiting Association Chat’s patreon site. You can also find more information about live events, private communities, special projects, and more, on associationchat.com. See you next time.

KiKi L’Italien: Hey, Association Chat is in its 10th year, and independently owned and produced by me, Kiki L’Italien and a very small crew of freelancers and volunteers. We appreciate our sponsors like you wouldn’t believe. So I want to give a special thanks to all of our sponsors. Today, that includes Boulder, Event Waves, and Amplified Growth. Thanks to all of you. And if you want to find out more about sponsorship, then go to associationchat.com or email me kiki@amplifiedgrowth.net, and we’ll be happy to talk with you. All right. Thanks.

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