EPISODE 31: What makes pet food consumers tick?

The below transcript is from Episode 31 of the Trending: Pet Food podcast, where host Lindsay Beaton spoke with David Allison, founder of The Valuegraphics Project. The two dive past demographics and psychographics to get at the core of what makes consumers do what they do and buy what they buy. You can find the episode at Trending: Pet Food Podcast, on SoundCloud or on your favorite podcast platform. This episode originally aired in Spring 2023.

We want to thank AFB International for sponsoring this podcast. AFB is the premier supplier of palatants to pet food companies worldwide offering off-the-shelf and custom solutions that make pet food treats and supplements taste great.

Lindsay Beaton – Editor, Petfood Industry magazine and Host, Trending: Pet Food podcast: Hello and welcome to Trending: Pet Food, the industry podcast where we cover all the latest hot topics and trends in pet food. I’m your host and editor of Petfood Industry magazine, Lindsay Beaton, and I’m here with David Allison, global values leader, human behavior expert and founder of The Valuegraphics Project. Hi, David and welcome.

David Allison, founder of The Valuegraphics Project: Thanks for having me over. I like your spare bedroom.

Beaton: In case you’re not familiar with David or The Valuegraphics Project, here’s what you need to know. After decades in marketing, David recognized that demographics weren’t working. Gender roles are blurring. It has nothing to do with how people behave, and incomes don’t change what’s in people’s hearts. It’s values that drive behavior.

He launched The Valuegraphics Project to create the first accurate inventory of core human values for everyone on Earth. After 750,000 surveys in 152 languages the project has resulted in a complete directory of human decision making. Innovative organizations like Pay Pal, Lululemon and the United Nations Foundation are connecting with people in new more profound ways by honoring what they value. From deep inside the data, David brings a clear and powerful truth to transform the way we work and the world we live in.

David Allison is our opening keynote speaker at Petfood Forum 2023 being held at the beginning of May. He’ll be speaking on what Valuegraphics can tell you about your pet food consumers, where he’ll share the common core values of pet owners based on an exclusive survey conducted for Petfood Forum.

As a preview to this, as well as to gain more insights into the idea of Valuegraphics at large, I brought David on today to answer this question: How can we gain new insights into what makes pet food consumers tick?

Now David, I want to start by giving our audience an idea of the difference between more traditional consumer demographics and the data you gather and analyze. How did Valuegraphics come to be? What are some of the fundamental differences that you decided to focus on when you started this project?

Allison:  That’s two questions wrapped up in one. We’ll start with how did  Valuegraphics come to me? I was in marketing for a very, very long time had a big successful marketing firm. In fact, and I noticed the same thing happening every single time we did something for a client. This applies to human resources, it applies to product development, applies to marketing, branding, everything.

We always start in a room with a bunch of people and ask, “Okay, who are we doing this for?” We try to describe the target audience as best we can. At the time, my company was in the business of helping real estate developers with large scale condominium projects and resort projects all the way around the world. What was cool about that is those projects have a beginning and a middle and an end.

We would figure out who we’re doing it for, spend a million bucks trying to talk to those people, get them to buy condos or resort homes, whatever. Then within two years, I was in a room with them and say, “Here’s who showed up.” Who showed up? Who we spent a million dollars talking to didn’t match with who showed up. Who are these people in the room? What are they doing here? Maybe 10% or 15% of the people in the room matched the target audience description, the demographics and the psychographics about those folks, and the rest of them? Always a big mystery.

I set out to see if I could solve that, because that seems like a big failure. If we’re spending a million bucks and only 10% or 15% is producing results, where’s all that other money? Forget the money — the effort and the time? And why are they here?

That took me down this path of looking into behavioral science. After all, it’s just trying to figure out how do people decide to be in that room? Metaphorically speaking, how do people decide to buy stuff? How do people decide to do anything?

Once you start digging deep, which I’ll unpack in my keynote, it basically comes down to this: human brains are hardwired in only one way. There’s only one thing we use to make decisions about everything in our lives all day long, 24/7. Tiny little things you don’t even know you’re doing, and the big giant decisions too. That’s our values.

There’s a piece of our brain that’s responsible for this. It uses values to decide whether we’re going to choose door A or door B in every situation. Eureka! This was the moment I thought, “Let’s go figure this out. If we could understand the values of people, then we could stop these terrible percentages.”

The reason all those people were in the room in my origin story — they were all there because they had some set of values that led them there. We just didn’t know that’s what we were doing. We just lucked out. We got those extra 80% to show up by saying something that responded to their values, and they were like, “Oh, that’s the place for me.”

I realized there was no way to understand the values of a large group of people like a target audience for something in advance. You can talk to them after they’ve done a thing and ask, “What are your values?” But to know in advance when we need to know, because we’re spending the money to get them to do something, there wasn’t a tool, so that’s what we built.

We built the Valuegraphics database. We launched the Valuegraphics Project and built the Valuegraphics database. It’s the first segmental values-driven data resource that can help us understand the shared values of any target audience for anything anywhere on Earth

Now we can look at a group of people who are going to buy pet food — doesn’t matter whether they’re 18 to 24, 25, 36, 37 or 45 — that doesn’t matter. Boomers, millennials, men, women, rich, poor, black, white, green, purple, gay, straight, none of those matters. What matters is some values are going to get these folks to say, “That’s the pet food I’m going to buy for my pet.”

If we know what those are, then pet food manufacturers can just speak into those values and say, “This is the one for you, my friend, this is the one that you should choose.”

Beaton: Making such a huge shift in how you look at people and survey people sounds like an incredibly tall order. Who did you even talk to to start figuring out how to properly survey people about their values? I can imagine there might be some people who might not tell the truth.

Allison: Oh, yeah – people can lie like crazy about this stuff.

Beaton: Who did you talk to to even construct a survey that would ask the questions in a way that you could build a reliable database on something that is deeply personal and internal as somebody’s value structure?

Allison: Great question. It’s true. If you put a roomful of people together and say, “Who thinks family is important?” They’re all going to say yes, even if they hate their family. Who thinks the environment is important? Who’s going to say no to that? Values are a really hard thing to get people to answer and talk to you about if you ask them about them directly.

The first thing to know is we never asked anybody directly. We asked them about what’s going on in their life, and about how they’re behaving and what is important to them. All that sort of stuff. Here’s an example. Let’s say I’m from Canada. I like to use this as an example.

If we knew that you were a hockey fan, because on your Facebook page, you’re talking about hockey a bunch, then we’d throw up an invitation to be part of a study on hockey fans say, hey, we know you’re the biggest hockey fan in the world, would you give us a couple of minutes and give us your expert opinion. Or you ask someone for their expert opinion on things that they’re excited about. They’re going to just be thrilled that someone’s recognized how expert they are. They’re going to just dive right in. And they did — 750,000 people dove right in and helped us understand the things that were important in their life.

So hockey, that person would have had a series of questions: you’re a hockey man, if your team gets kicked out of the series of the second game of the season, would you cheer for a different team? No. Okay. Do you watch games with your friends? Your family, your coworkers? Do you travel for games? You watch them at home? In the living room? What are you wearing when you watch games? Are you in your sweats? Are you wearing a jersey? Do you have a couple of jerseys? Do you drink? How much do you drink? Have you ever gone to a game? An away game? Which ones do you prefer?

They’re having the time of their lives telling us about hockey and being a hockey fan. But what they’re really telling us about his loyalty, and family and relationships, and some of these other core issues that are driving the decisions around this thing that’s very important to them.

Ask 750,000 people those same kinds of questions around the world, and guess what? Humans aren’t all that different. Patterns start to emerge; you start to see a whole lot of people whose biggest things in their life are influenced by their family. So, you didn’t have to ask, who thinks family is important? Because they told you what was important in their life. If what was important in their life involves their family, and 300,000 people around the world say the same sort of thing, you start to see some patterns in the noise.

I often tell the story this way. It’s like Halloween. When your kid comes home from Halloween with a pillowcase full of candy, which they used to do. I guess these days, we don’t do that so much anymore, because stranger danger and all that kind of stuff. But I used to come home when I was a kid with a pillowcase full of candy and dump it out in the dining room table. You stand there, and the fun part for me anyway was always sorting it out. You put it in piles, you’re like, “Okay, we got chocolate bars, yay. I love those houses. I wish I could remember where they came from.” You got the lollipops and the bubble gum and the single-wrapped candies with that orange and black paper that tasted like — I don’t know what those were, but we had those. The data tells you how to organize itself.

We looked at 750,000 people telling us stuff about what was going on in their lives and what was important and how they were behaving and what their emotions were around all these different topic areas. We dumped it all on the dining room table. The data told us there was 56 piles of candy, and those are the 56 values that rule everything that everybody on Earth does.

Those 750,000 people weren’t random. We collected those in a way that’s referred to as a random stratified statistically representative sample of the population of 180 countries around the world. It’s basically a miniaturized model of the planet and all the people who live on it.

The data that we pull from those people answering those questions, you can extrapolate and it’s true for the entire population. Now, here’s the key. Those piles of candy, there’s 56 values in the Valuegraphics database. Each is a pile of candy, But the candies aren’t all the same, right? The pile of chocolate bars, lots of different chocolate bars in there. Let me give you an example.

One value very important in the United States, and in many countries, not all uniformly, but in the United States, the number one most important value is belonging. There are 192 kinds of belonging in that pile of chocolate bars, and we’ve coded every one of them.

When we extract a profile for pet food shoppers, like I’ve done for this keynote I’ll be doing at the Petfood Forum, we’re going to be able to say, “Here’s the exact kind of chocolate bar in that pile that we call ‘belonging.’” If belonging is one of the values that shows up as being important for people who buy pet food. That’s the data question.

This is a good moment to talk about demographics and psychographics, because those are the other ways we look at humans, right? We think about this as a three-legged stool. You must be on three legs to be sturdy, if you only have two legs, you’re on a tippy surface. It’s not a great way to spend money on your marketing, branding, product development.

Demographics still have a place. We still need to be able to put a fence around a group of people. I go back to my real estate days and said, “I’m selling penthouse condominiums in downtown Gotham City, that’s not going to sell to 16-year-olds who work at the grocery store.” It’s clear who’s buying a $5 million penthouse at the top of a building.

But to think that we understand who those people are is wrong. All we know is what they are. We know they make a certain amount of money, they’re married, they probably are empty nesters, blah, blah, blah. Those people aren’t all the same as each other. No more than any group of people are the same as each other when you put them in demographic piles.

In fact, one of the things we’ve learned from all these surveys we’ve done, these giant databases we’ve built, is that people within a demographic cohort, a cluster, only resemble each other on the values they use to drive their lives, about 10.5% across the board. So Gen Z and boomers and men, women, people who are in this much money or that much money, black, white, gay, straight, educated — all those different labels, those demographic labels, the people within them, on average, are 10.5% similar.

If you spend a buck talking to a target audience of Gen Z, who earn $75,000, a year in the beginning stages of their white-collar career with a college education, they’re single, that’s a whole bunch of groups that resemble each other about 10.5% of the time piled on top of each other to a bigger group that resembles each other about 10.5% of the time. Then we have a 90% built in fail rate in everything we do. To chase that group of people — 90% fail.

This is why we get so excited when a direct marketing campaign gives us a 3% return. Like oh my god, 3% of the people opened that email! Pop the champagne corks, my friends. That’s a 97% fail! We’re using the wrong way to look at people, it’s not a thing to celebrate. That’s a failure of epic proportions. You’ve just wasted 97% of your money, your time, your effort, your resources, your brain cells, trying to talk to a group of people. You got 3% of them to say “Yes.” That’s terrible. Let’s stop celebrating that and figure out what’s wrong.

What’s wrong, is we’re using the wrong way to look at people. We’re putting them in groups of people that don’t resemble each other, then throwing one message in there and hoping some of it sticks. And 3% to 4% will stick.

Here’s another stat that’s even more alarming. Only 10.5% similarity within a demographic cohort. All of us around the world, everybody who’s alive today, just because we’re human. If we look and see how often we agree with each other on all those values that we use to make every decision in our life, we agree with each other — just by virtue of being human and awake and upright and breathing — 8% of the time.

The delta between the two is 2.5%. It’s 2.5% more accurate to use demographics to understand a targeted audience than it is to just say, whatever the heck pops into your head and not worry about it at all. Because everybody as a human gives you an 8% ROI; 10.5% ROI, on average, for a demographic group. It’s basically a wash.

We’ve got a 3.5% level of accuracy plus or minus in our database. You include that, we’re at zero. You. You may as well just say anything at all. It’s going to be as accurate as using demographics to understand a group of people.

Demographics

Demographics are still necessary. You mustYou must put a fence around them. We’re going to sell penthouse condominiums to wealthy baby boomers who are selling their single-family home in the suburbs, but they’re not all the same as each other. You must also understand what’s in their hearts, not just what they look like on the outside.

The other bucket of data we look at is a whole whack of different stuff that I’m just going to call “psychographics.” This is what people’s emotions are in their brand index preferences and their likes and their dislikes and their click studies on websites, and how often do they fill their shopping cart, and then you know, everything, all the other stuff that’s out there. It’s all cool, but I think we’ve kind of gone a little overboard with a bunch of it.

Frankly, somebody sent a memo out 10 years ago and said “that is the new gold!” and everybody just start running around collecting data. I can’t tell you how many boardrooms I go into now, where the group I’m working with is just paralyzed. There’s too much data and they don’t know what to do. Like, “Ah, we don’t want to make the wrong decision.”

Data paralysis is a real is a real thing. If you look at that data, you can get a sense of some patterns. These people tend to behave these ways. You have a demographic definition of what some people are, and you can see how they’ve behaved in the past.

Let’s take it back to pet food. If they buy three cans of premium dog food, we know some stuff about them. The problem with all that data is it’s all from the same place, which is the past. Because we know it, we wrote it down, even if it happened two seconds ago. It’s historical. We have demographics as a describer, and we have psychographics as a historic record.

What we’re all trying to do is influence the next thing that happens the future. We’re not looking in the rearview mirror, we’re looking at the front of the car. To do that, you need to know how your group of people that you’ve defined demographically and know a few things about psychographically, how they’re going to make their next decision. That’s going to be about their values.

If you have all three of those — demographics, psychographics, valuegraphics –you know what they are, what they’ve done, and what they’ll do next. Now you’re ready to go. Now you can start spending the million dollars. Start designing a new product and figuring out how you’re going to talk about the ones you already have, or how you need to hire people. What’s your sales team language and pathing? What’s the customer journey? What’s the UX on your website? What presents do you send out at the holidays to your best client? Everything can be answered if you go back and understand your target audiences’ heart and not use demographic stereotypes to try and understand people.

Beaton: I think this is probably going to speak to a lot of people in the industry because there has been a significant shift in the way consumers want to be interacted with. Overall, I’ve mentioned this before and written about it in the magazine, that pet food used to be very transactional, right? You make a pet food, I buy your pet food, I give it to my pet. The end.

Now consumers at large, not just in the pet food industry, but in many industries, want to know more about the brands that they’re putting their money towards. They want to know the story. They want something that aligns with their values.

I can see this being an incredibly valuable thing to add to your toolbox when you’re trying to figure out who your audience is, who you want to sell to, where you’re trying to go. But I can also hear all the poor marketers out there going, “Oh, no, another data set. Please help!”

What have you seen as the most successful way for companies to integrate this new data set into their existing tools, so they don’t feel like they’re just tossing out years of demographic data and tossing away all the psychographics? How can you integrate everything so that you’re not staring at three piles of datasets desperately trying to figure out where the alignment is and what you’re supposed to do with all of it?

Allison: Let me answer that question, but I want to start by responding to something you said as part of your question, which is this change in the way consumers are interacting with these brands. You’re very prescient. What’s going on right now is after COVID, where we all had some time to sit at home and think about what’s most important in our lives, we are behaving in ways that are more aligned with our values than they’ve ever been before.

Values have always driven human behaviors and emotions. This is just a biological fact. What’s happened is, because of COVID, we all had to go through a thing together. We all did one thing in various kinds of ways. We all dealt with this global issue. Maybe the last time something like this happened was World War II. A huge global thing happened, and then everybody’s responding to that huge global thing.

We’re all able to sit around his organizations and say,” Wow, people are behaving based on their values, because there’s a whole bunch of people responding all at the same time to one thing.” In fact, we’ve always been doing this. It’s just been a little group of people behaving in different kinds of ways to the little things that were happening in their lives. This is the biggest sociological experiment in history. We’ve all just been put into an experiment. Here’s a thing that happened. Now what are you guys all going to do? We can all sit back and watch and see what’s going on.

Values are the most powerful force on Earth. Full stop, bar none. There is no question they drive everything we do. Everything we see on the news today, from social change issues to the future of leadership, the future of work, are we going back to work? Or aren’t we? Let’s talk about that one, for a moment.

Are we going back to work, or aren’t we? That’s people with different sets of values saying I don’t want to or I, of course, we must, or let’s do something in the middle. That’s our values, speaking on our behalf and saying, “This is how I want my life to go.”

Let’s talk about consumerism. I can go on about any single topic you want, but they all come back to people, and people are all about their values. Consumerism, the tale of two companies. Let’s look at Twitter, here’s a little organization under new management, we can say, and we’re seeing values disrespected on all fronts. The staff is in revolt, the consumers, the users are having a hard time the advertisers are running away. There’s a dumpster fire there, because values are being absolutely disregarded by the new management team of one person.

Then you go to another company, as an example, and look at Patagonia. I know we’re all sick and tired of listening to stories about how amazing they are. But over the course of their decades of existence, they figured out what the values are of that organization. They played right into those values. Now we all look at them and go, “Wow, how smart are they? Look, their values-driven organization.” Right up to the point where Bernard stands up and says, “I don’t need any more money, just take my company and use it to save the planet.” Mic drop. The biggest single values-driven mic drop in the history of values.

Imagine the next morning waking up if you’re the vice president of marketing for North Face. He’d just be like, “Oh, damn, now what do I do? Those people are never not going to buy North Face ever again. They are cemented. There’s no stealing share anymore, Mr. North Face, it’s not going to happen.” You must figure out something to stand for and get the folks who are interested in those values to follow you.

I will go as far as this — we are in an entirely new economic era. We’ve left the sharing economy, the gig economy, the experience. We are in the values economy now. Everything that consumers are doing, including the way they’re reacting to pet food companies, is about their values.

A pet food company that doesn’t have an answer isn’t purpose-driven, which is all about determining which values are important and then driving in that direction. You’re in trouble. Values washing is a real thing. You could get called out if you fake this. You just stand up and say our values are environmentalism, collaboration, creativity, and diversity, because we think that’s what you want us to say, “We better not be doing that and we’re going to get called out.”

Here’s data that can help us determine what are the values that are driving people forward? Your question was, how do we integrate that? First, you must get it. If you’re coming to the Petfood Forum, you’re very lucky because I’m going to stand up on stage and tell you all the things you need to know about the values of pet food decision makers. The folks in the stores are online, how are they deciding which brand they’re going to buy? What are the values they’re using to evaluate choice A and choice B?

I’m also going to give you a set of tools and techniques you can use to find ways to use that information to build your strategies around innovation. What’s the next thing we should launch? What should it be about? What are the trends that everybody’s watching right now? How do you pick which one to hitch your wagon to? How do you decide how to take the current product that you have and tweak the positioning and the branding just a little bit, so it’s aligning with these values that I’m going to give you when I’m on stage.

Let me give you a fun example about that. One of the things we collect when we do all this data is how much more will people pay for certain things if it’s aligned with their values? For household everyday items, the number across the world, is coming in at about 8%. They’ll tolerate an 8% price hike or price differential to find things that are aligned with their values.

You do your own math on that and figure out how much that could mean to your bottom line just for changing the way you think about people. My favorite example of that is Oreo cookies because that’s my favorite cookie. I figure if I keep using this as an example one day Mr. Oreo will call me and offer me a sponsorship. Oreo cookies last year, 2022 data, made $4 billion in sales — $4 billion times 8% is $320 million. $320 million, just for saying. “Oh, Oreo cookie fans, they value this, this and this.”

Let’s start talking about that in our social media. Let’s change the phrasing on some of the packaging that we have just to highlight those things. Let’s think about sponsorships and community engagement in a way that relates back to those values. The same set of techniques holds true for pet food. Once you know the values you need to speak into. You just do everything you can to make sure that the ideas, the strategies, the thoughts you’re putting forward align back to those values of the 56 values.

Here’s my example for pet food folks. The one value that I’m going to talk about on stage in more depth — but I’m going to share with you here just as a little bit of a teaser — is one value that scores high for pet food shoppers, decision makers, pet parents, and that is the value of personal responsibility.

Now of the 56 values, this is a value that hasn’t been talked about earlier when we talked about lots of chocolates, different kinds of chocolate bars in that pile of data. The personal responsibility that these folks are looking for has to do with being integrally involved in making decisions for themselves.

Pet food manufacturers, how can you let consumers feel like they have a say, in your product? If you’re a smaller group, and you can do this, can they bulk order online and choose some of the ingredients that get to go into their delivery? For example, I’m going to buy enough pet food for the next year; please add extra vitamin D and this and some of that to my order.

If you could do a personalized kind of product for this audience, they would love it. If that’s outside the bounds of actual possibility, what else can you do that helps them understand that this is their choice, they’re in the driver’s seat, they are the deciders. It’s not us saying, here’s what you get. It’s them saying, “Here’s what I want.”

Just knowing that flip — think about how you phrase everything. Think about, if you’ve done AI, and you have some consumer research before you launch your next product into the market, let everybody know how much consumer research you did before you put it into the market. “You know what, we talked to a billion people around the world. And they said to us, they want this, this, this, this and this. So that’s what we did. Because it’s all about you, my friends, you’re the ones who help us decide how to make our food, the best pet food possible. Thank you for your help. And now it’s available for you in the stores.”

You just made it about them. Don’t make it about you. What do brands love to do? They make it about themselves. “Oh, we’re so smart. We’re so environmentally friendly, we’re so sustainable.” What these people want to hear is that it’s all about them. Find a way to make that at least some part of how you’re speaking into that market.

Beaton: Before I was speaking for the marketers, and now I feel like I’m hearing the C suite saying, “This is very counter to the way that business used to be done.” There’s very much a hands-off approach to being a business entity that has been ingrained. Especially in the U.S., I can only speak to the U.S., but that businesses should be value-neutral monoliths. They are there to make money. They give you a product, you take the product, end of story. There is no story.

But that is simply, from what you’re saying and from what I’ve seen in the shifts just in the brands that I you know, more brands are willing to come out and say, “This is what we believe. This is where we’re putting our money. This is what we’re standing behind.” It sounds like that is not a good idea anymore, or that you simply can’t. Because there are too many companies putting their values out there that consumers are now paying attention to, and then they’re turning to you and going, “Okay, what’s your deal?”

How do you help business owners or those in the higher echelons who must decide to make these business shifts? How do you make them less reticent to jump into the fray, so to speak, because that’s probably what it feels like. If you’ve been running a business for so long like, “Look, internally, we do things this way, we make a good product, that’s all consumers want.” And now suddenly, they’re being told, “That’s not enough.”  

It’s not enough to make a good product, people are not even going to look at your good product if you can’t give them a story and a reason to look at your product. How do you make them less reticent and more willing to make that shift and start thinking about something in a completely different way?

Allison: That’s an amazing question. It comes up more often these days than it ever has before. There’s a newsflash here: It’s not all about profit anymore.

We all grew up at a time going through business school, where it was drummed into us. The purpose of a business is to increase shareholder value. I should have had that tattooed on my forehead and maybe then the profs would have given me a break on it. Yes, I get it. That’s the purpose of a business, but it’s not the case anymore. It’s now to find the intersection of profit and purpose, to do something while you’re making money, you must do both.

You can’t just do stuff and make no money or you’re not going to be there. You can’t just make money and not make things happen in the world, or you’re going to get flamed on Twitter and things are going to go really, really bad. You can’t fake it. You can’t valueswash by standing up and throwing out some poetry and saying, “this is what we stand for,” when you don’t.

There’s lots and lots of cases of companies being called out trying to look like they have some values when they in fact, don’t. So how do I help the C suite? Well, you know what, we built this for a C suite audience, because the love language of a C suite audience is data, and taking what we’re talking about here, which is this messy, irrational, illogical, nonsensical thing called human behavior that doesn’t lend itself well to spreadsheets and data and turning it into their love language of data so that you can now sit down and go, “Okay, I get it values are important.”

I don’t have to just rely on some creative guy saying, I think the most important thing is this, and that, and the other. There’s data, and it says, “This is what my customers value.” If you really want to do this properly, you look at all the different stakeholder groups that an organization will impact. Yes, shareholders, because there’s still one “got to think about” — your customers and your customers of tomorrow.

The people who are going to buy your stuff. Think about your employees and the employees of tomorrow, the people who are going to make it possible. You must think about your vendors, your partners, the other folks in the chain that you rely on to get stuff to happen. The fifth group is the communities that you’re impacting with the work that you do, if you take all five of those stakeholder groups, and understand what their core values are, what drives each of those groups.

Think about it like a series of five interlocking Venn circles. Find the place where they all overlap, and they will. Because there’s only 56 values that drive us, you’ll find two or three values that can now be a North star metric for you. As long as you keep making every decision for this organization, in terms of every aspect of your operations, and your strategy and your fulfillments, everything you’re doing, based on those two or three North star values, every single stakeholder group will be considered and seen in the way that you run the organization.

This whole big scary thing about how do we be values driven? How do we be purpose led? How do we show people that we actually do care about something? It doesn’t have to be all light and fluffy and fuzzy. It can be as empirically sound as any other business metric now that we have data. That’s my biggest dream is that we can unleash this in a way where the largest organizations on Earth end up being data-led and values driven.

Here’s why it will be good for them. They’ll make some money. I’ll make some money, but I don’t need a private jet. This is not why I’m in this. Here’s the real problem. Right now, in boardrooms around the world, we sit together and say, “We have a group of people here, we need to understand them, because they’re going to be a target audience for us, or employee group, or whoever.”

We look at groups of people and try and sort them out and figure them out. We say to ourselves, “Okay, well, are they male or female, rich or poor, young or old, gay or straight, black or white, married single?” We apply all those labels innocently, because it’s what we’ve been taught to do. But what that does is it says to each of us into the world, that that’s the right way to look at people, that the right way to understand people is with demographic labels, because it’s what we know how to do.

Now we know it doesn’t work. They only got a 10.5% similarity, remember, for every one of these groups, so it’s not really doing us any favors from that perspective. But worse, it’s perpetuating stereotypes about what it means to be male or female, young or old, rich or poor, gay or straight, black or white.

If we take that label that we apply to a group and say, “Okay, my market is 85% female. Let’s go make it pink and use cursive text.” You start making stereotypical leaps. Because of course you do. You’re looking at people in a stereotypical way that is inaccurate then trying to extrapolate from that.

What should we do with this information? It’s far harder than the trouble you have trying to understand how to extrapolate strategy or values. It’s way more difficult and dicier to be doing it based on demographics, because they’re so freaking inaccurate — those leaps, those stereotypes.

If you don’t think this is still happening, go into the toy store and look at the pink toys and the blue toys. It’s happening all around us in ways we can’t even put our finger on. Sometimes, what we’re doing, as we continue to do this innocent thing called “demographic profiling” that doesn’t work and messes things up, is we’re fueling the fires of sexism and ageism and racism and homophobia. Those are demographically-fueled issues.

Now, I’m not saying that switching to a valuegraphic perspective on the world is going to make those things go away. Humans are humans after all. But why feed the fire by continuing to convince each other that this is correct, that we should look at a group of people and try and figure out how many of them are men? How many of them are women. Why? What does that lead us to? That leads us to nothing except stereotypes.

Rare exceptions — everybody wants to fight about this. “But what if it’s a product that’s just for women?” Of course, but still, stop with the stereotyping. Here’s a better way. Let’s look at what’s inside of people, not what’s on the outside of people. Let’s see what’s in their hearts. What’s driving them? What do they care about so much that it gets them out of bed every day and makes them do everything that they do all day long?

If we could start to build a world full of products and services and brands that are based on what we care about in our hearts, I think it would be a much, much better world. That’s why this is important.

Beaton: I can’t think of any better way to wrap up our conversation then on that note. That is phenomenal. If this is a preview of what your talk is going to be like at Petfood Forum, I think everybody is in for something. Hopefully, we will see everybody there.

I really appreciate you speaking with me today, David. As we continue to try to figure out how to understand where pet owners and consumers in general are coming from and making it part of your business strategy and knowing that this is something we need to figure out to succeed in business, I think this way of coming at that question and what we’re trying to do is fascinating. Before we go, I want to do a little plug, where can people find more information about you and the Valugraphics Project?

Allison: There are a couple things you can do. I have a new book that came out November, it’s called The Death of Demographics. It’s a nice dramatic title. I don’t think we should kill them, as I’ve already explained. I think we should just like use them properly. We don’t need to really kill them, but that doesn’t make a great book title. “I don’t think we should kill demographics” — that’s not a good book title. It’s called The Death of Demographics. In there, there’s a quiz people can use to survey their own CRM and start to at least dip their toe in the water around a values-driven way of looking at people and a whole bunch of other information and good stuff in there. That’s available on Amazon.

The website that’s about my speaking work and my work as a writer is davidallisoninc.com. The research company has their own website, and that’s valuegraphics.com.