Convincing, insightful, and possibly revolutionary marketing advice.
A business book makes a case for values-based marketing.
Marketers have long relied on demographics, such as age, gender, and marital status, to define specific audiences. Applying psychographics that include attitudes and aspirations helps refine audience segments. But according to researcher and international speaker Allison, how people actually behave comes from understanding human values—something he has built a research company around, using more than 750,000 global surveys to develop a “Valuegraphics Database” of 56 values that funnel into 15 “Valuegraphics archetypes.” This is more than merely marketing mumbo jumbo; Allison offers a solid, compelling argument for why his approach is sensibly relevant. Not surprisingly, the first part of the book is designed to wean marketers off their devotion to demographics. Characterizing demographics as “the Dewey Decimal System of humanity,” Allison notes they are useful for classification, but “there’s no link between what people are and what they’ll do next.” With that as the basis for fundamental change, in Part 2 of the volume the author uses examples and cites scientific research to show how and why values hold the key to human behavior. Allison explains the rationale behind the Valuegraphics Database and identifies the 56 human values he says can be applied globally. Part 3 is particularly intriguing; here, Allison takes readers on an informative tour, demonstrating how Valuegraphics are similar and different across the world’s various regions. Part 4, characterized by the author as a “DIY Valuegraphics Toolkit,” provides a detailed, four-step process that includes the raw materials a marketer needs to construct a “Valuegraphics Profile.” Part 5 eloquently defines and describes the 15 “data-driven archetypes,” such as “The Seekers,” “The Creatives,” and “The Savers,” that Allison believes represent broad categories encompassing the values identified for specific audiences. Finally, Part 6 is a valuable compendium of “case stories” illustrating how the Valuegraphics methodology can be applied in various real-world situations. The author writes with clarity, passion, and unbridled enthusiasm for “the power and potential of a values-driven view of humanity.” He generously shares information about Valuegraphics with the fervent hope that marketers will embrace his thinking.
Convincing, insightful, and possibly revolutionary marketing advice.Pub Date: Nov. 29, 2022
ISBN: 9781544534619
Page Count: 376
Publisher: Lioncrest Publishing
Review Posted Online: Jan. 25, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2023
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
BOOK REVIEW
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.
Helping liberals get out of their own way.
Klein, a New York Times columnist, and Thompson, an Atlantic staffer, lean to the left, but they aren’t interrogating the usual suspects. Aware that many conservatives have no interest in their opinions, the authors target their own side’s “pathologies.” Why do red states greenlight the kind of renewable energy projects that often languish in blue states? Why does liberal California have the nation’s most severe homelessness and housing affordability crises? One big reason: Liberal leadership has ensnared itself in a web of well-intentioned yet often onerous “goals, standards, and rules.” This “procedural kludge,” partially shaped by lawyers who pioneered a “democracy by lawsuit” strategy in the 1960s, threatens to stymie key breakthroughs. Consider the anti-pollution laws passed after World War II. In the decades since, homeowners’ groups in liberal locales have cited such statutes in lawsuits meant to stop new affordable housing. Today, these laws “block the clean energy projects” required to tackle climate change. Nuclear energy is “inarguably safer” than the fossil fuel variety, but because Washington doesn’t always “properly weigh risk,” it almost never builds new reactors. Meanwhile, technologies that may cure disease or slash the carbon footprint of cement production benefit from government support, but too often the grant process “rewards caution and punishes outsider thinking.” The authors call this style of governing “everything-bagel liberalism,” so named because of its many government mandates. Instead, they envision “a politics of abundance” that would remake travel, work, and health. This won’t happen without “changing the processes that make building and inventing so hard.” It’s time, then, to scrutinize everything from municipal zoning regulations to the paperwork requirements for scientists getting federal funding. The authors’ debut as a duo is very smart and eminently useful.
Cogent, well-timed ideas for meeting today’s biggest challenges.Pub Date: March 18, 2025
ISBN: 9781668023488
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Avid Reader Press
Review Posted Online: Jan. 16, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our...
A psychologist and Nobel Prize winner summarizes and synthesizes the recent decades of research on intuition and systematic thinking.
The author of several scholarly texts, Kahneman (Emeritus Psychology and Public Affairs/Princeton Univ.) now offers general readers not just the findings of psychological research but also a better understanding of how research questions arise and how scholars systematically frame and answer them. He begins with the distinction between System 1 and System 2 mental operations, the former referring to quick, automatic thought, the latter to more effortful, overt thinking. We rely heavily, writes, on System 1, resorting to the higher-energy System 2 only when we need or want to. Kahneman continually refers to System 2 as “lazy”: We don’t want to think rigorously about something. The author then explores the nuances of our two-system minds, showing how they perform in various situations. Psychological experiments have repeatedly revealed that our intuitions are generally wrong, that our assessments are based on biases and that our System 1 hates doubt and despises ambiguity. Kahneman largely avoids jargon; when he does use some (“heuristics,” for example), he argues that such terms really ought to join our everyday vocabulary. He reviews many fundamental concepts in psychology and statistics (regression to the mean, the narrative fallacy, the optimistic bias), showing how they relate to his overall concerns about how we think and why we make the decisions that we do. Some of the later chapters (dealing with risk-taking and statistics and probabilities) are denser than others (some readers may resent such demands on System 2!), but the passages that deal with the economic and political implications of the research are gripping.
Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds.Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2011
ISBN: 978-0-374-27563-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Sept. 3, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2011
BOOK REVIEW
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