How much of our marketing has been calibrated to a culture and set of values that may be on the verge of radical change?
There is no shortage of opinion seeing our society as hyper-consumerist, bearing the seeds of its own self-destruction. Some industry commentators see the cultural turmoil afoot ushering in big changes in marketing. A handy example is the cover article of the most recent issue of Media magazine, “Age of Dissent: Has America’s 50-Year Shopping Spree Hit the Wall?”, by Steve Smith (free registration is needed to access the article). Smith does a good job of moving beyond mere tactical adjustments to address the near-term economic malaise and sees permanent changes to how marketing is done because of a pervasive change in culture.
Quite apart from questions of whether these changes are good or bad and who and what are to blame for our economic predicament, the fact is significant cultural changes are far more likely now than a year ago. Furthermore, the probability of dramatic and longer-lasting change is higher, and the direction and profile of the changes may be easier to discern.
So what does this mean for marketers and marketing analysts?
The first is that old insights and models of behavior may no longer hold. If you believe attitudes and worldviews are significant drivers of behavior, tools we’ve used and calibrated for years may become quickly obsolete. The other is that the changes are likely to happen at varying rates in different segments of our society. The result will be even greater fragmentation in our markets and customer bases.
Fortunately, we believe marketing analytics and modeling can help address these issues if culture can be measured, modeled, and targeted. We use the term Culture Graphics for this challenge and the solutions that can be applied to it.
For the last six months or so we’ve looked at ways to apply a body of academic work in the field of measuring and describing cultural differences to more specific marketing problems. The work that has been most influential for us relates to the World Value Survey, a multi-wave series of cultural surveys that have been conducted in nearly 100 societies since 1981. One of the most helpful academic investigators into the survey data has been Ronald Inglehart, a political scientist from the University of Michigan who has distilled various cultural components into two principal dimensions: one relating to attitudes toward authority and sources of authority, the second relating to how much material achievement drives personal well-being.
These dimensions are captured in the Inglehart-Welzel
Cultural Map of the World, a helpful summary of how cultural values both vary
and cluster among the world’s societies.
Inglehart’s primary concern is understanding cross-national differences in cultural and how cultural change relates to political and economic development. But by finding empirical support for collapsing a variety of cultural values into two dimensions, Inglehart lays the groundwork for measuring and modeling cultural differences among households and individuals.
We have begun finding ways to use a combination of household and community (i.e., zip code-based) data to model households into cultural categories that can be used to develop and target differentiated marketing. Adding Culture Graphics to our analytic work is providing valuable additional information to more traditional demographic and behavioral data.
We’ll post more on findings from our work in the Culture Graphics area as they develop. Meanwhile, we encourage comments or contact by any who are similarly interested in what we believe will be a fruitful and fascinating area for marketing analytics.
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