Our Research

Values Drive Behavior
Traditional age-based demographic research analyzes past behavior in the attempt to predict future behavior. Unfortunately, this analysis method is seriously flawed—because past behavior does not drive future behavior. Behaviors are not drivers, they are responses—responses to emotions that are activated by a person’s consistent and lasting set of values.

What is a Value?
Values are our subconscious perspectives on life that guide our behaviors. Values determine how we view the world and interface with it and other people. Values are survival mechanisms that teach us to adapt and allow us to survive in the environment that we are born and remain consistent throughout our entire lives. Values are not the things we want them to be or what we think they should be—values are what they have to be.

What Forms Our Values?
Values are formed through cultural apprenticeship from experiences in our formative years. Since the proliferation of mass communication starting in the 1920’s with the introduction of broadcast radio, value formation has increasingly become driven by social influences and events rather than historically consistent family and local cultural conditions

What is a Value Population?
Value Populations are groups whose consistent connection is shared values—values that were created by experiencing shared events in the cultural environment. And since values play such an important and increasing role in defining consistently behaving cohort groups, we could no longer use the traditional term “generation” to accurately define them, so we coined a new term, Value Populations.