Transcript: David Allison – Justin Brady Show
Justin Brady: [00:00:00] It is the Justin Brady Show and one of the things that really is a struggle, by the way, my voice is a little shot today, everybody. Sorry about that, but we’ll get through it together. One of the things that’s a struggle is finding out who you should actually target in your marketing efforts. That that’s actually very difficult once you think about it and it’s a struggling, it’s a struggle I’ve had with my clients for a very long time, which is why we’ve invited David Allison back on the show, the creator of the Value Graphics database, and we’re also gonna talk about your new book.
David, thanks for coming back on the show. Thanks
David Allison: for having me over. Second time’s a charm. Third time’s a charm. Second time lucky. Second time lucky. There you [00:01:00] go. So you’re just already asking me for a
Justin Brady: third interview there, aren’t you? I guess we should do that. Uh, before we get started, everybody as a reminder, make sure to subscribe and give the show five stars.
David’s already telling all his friends. Just kidding. Probably not. Maybe hope so. It’s on Google Podcasts. It’s on Apple, Spotify, Amazon. It is. It is everywhere. It, you know, bottom line, it’s everywhere. So make sure to subscribe and, um, and, uh, tell your friends, tell your neighbors. Uh, so David, thanks for coming back on here.
Here’s the big question. I I read the book. The book is The Death of Demographics. It’s, uh, I mean, you kind of, you’re, you’re the creator of the value graphics database. You’ve been on the show before, but I, I was a little shocked by this book ’cause this is now your global dataset and in it you kind of give out a lot of your processes.
For free. Now, obviously, if you want to do the real in depth value graphics profile on your customers and get the whole process that you know, that’s, that’s a cost you have to hire you. But I was a little stunned at how much you give out. But [00:02:00] first of all, let’s start with this. Most people are familiar with demographics.
Uh, should we not use demographic data
David Allison: anymore? No, no. Uh, demographics are still our friend, but the problem is we’ve been asking our friend to do too much work. So, you know, demographics are still a really necessary way for us to figure out something about the folks that we’re trying to target with whatever our product or service or brand or message might be.
So let’s take an example and say, um, you know, people who are, I have a background in real estate development way back when. So let’s say people who are gonna buy a, uh, $10 million penthouse in downtown Gotham City on the top of a new condo tower. Your target audience for that, there’s gonna be certain demographic realities.
It’s not gonna be a 17-year-old girl who just graduated from high school and works at the grocery store unless it’s a K Kardashian. There’s, you know, there’s a demographic reality around many products out there. Right. The problem is that once we put a fence around a group of people demographically. We say to ourselves, well, cool.
Now we know who these people are and we don’t. We know [00:03:00] what they are. Hmm. And there’s a huge difference. If you know what people are, that means you can describe them. You can tell me that they’re male or female, or rich or poor, young or older, black or white, or gay or straight or educated, uneducated, married, single, all those, all those things.
We know what they are. But those folks who are similar from that perspective could be incredibly different in terms of who they are. What they’re gonna pay attention to, how you need to influence them, how you need to engage them, inspire them, motivate them, what they’re looking for from you and from everything in their life.
So we gotta get past that. Surface level, surface level’s still necessary. Put a fence around a group of people that’s demographics all good. But then assuming that people who are demographically similar are actually similar on the inside where it counts. That’s where we’ve been going wrong.
Justin Brady: Okay, so demographics might be helpful.
For example, if you’re doing like very aggressive athletic shoes, it might be helpful not to target [00:04:00] people over the age of like 75, right? Sure. There are gonna be a few standouts in there, but in general, that’s probably, I don’t know, maybe one use for demographics. Um, maybe you’d agree with that. But, uh, my, my big question is that.
Were demographics ever accurate? Like historically, was there a point where demographics actually were useful, but to now, but now because of how connected we are, technology, et cetera, whatever else, they’re not as useful. I.
David Allison: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, way back in the olden days, uh, they were necessary because it was how we survived.
If we were, you know, go back thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and you’re in a little village in rural, I don’t know, France and, and, uh, a little tiny, you know, agrarian society, and you see some people coming over the hill towards you, you had to be able to look at them and go, Hmm. Well, they’re, uh, young males and they’re carrying spears and they’re running, uh, and they’re not from our town.
So chances are these are bad guys and we better do something about this. Um, but today you see, [00:05:00] you know, we, we, we, we don’t need to judge each other based on those outward facing characteristics anymore. It’s a, there’s a whole field of study around this called heuristics where we make snap judgements on people based on, uh, what we can see.
Right. And the, the, the fact of the matter is that, you know, trio of, um, uh, young black men walking down the street towards you late night in, uh, downtown, um, New York could be social workers who are out trying to make sure that nobody’s sleeping rough and, and, uh, that needs a blanket and a sandwich and.
And I don’t know, conversely, the three little old ladies coming down towards street towards you could all be packing, uh, and you know, gonna take you out and take your wallet. You have no idea. I’m being silly to make a point, but Right. We don’t need to use those stereotypes to survive anymore. I. And yet we do
Justin Brady: because it’s all we have.
So does using from a, from a corporate standpoint, ’cause most of my listeners are corporate, most of them are in business. They’re entrepreneurs, they’re leaders of organizations. [00:06:00] From a business standpoint, does using demographic data, because most of the marketing people, most of the leadership people listening to this do, do they do use demographic data still?
Primarily, yeah. Even, you know, ’cause we’ve talked about value graphics before, but I’m, I know most of them still do. So I guess the immediate. Pressing need is, does that cause, is that kind of a no gain, it doesn’t really do anything? Or does that set them up for failure? Like it, can it create some damage?
David Allison: Well, demographics, like we said, are, they’re still, they’re still super useful. I mean, the fact is most media is still sold demographically. So understanding the demographics of your target audience, your customers, your prospects, or your clients, whoever you’re trying to engage and influence and motivate, it’s gonna help you with, um, very sort of.
Uh, mechanical, um, uh, requirements and things that you need to do, but businesses of all kinds, all sizes, all categories of industry are all trying to do [00:07:00] exactly the same thing, which is to get some people to say yes. Right. And if you’re gonna try and get some people to say yes, you need to understand how people make decisions about what they’re gonna do, what they’re gonna say yes to.
And that takes you firmly into the fields of behavioral science. And while the different fields of, uh, behavioral science, uh, argue with each other. Other, the psychologists fight with the neurologists. The neurologists fight with the sociologists and vice versa there. They all fight like cats and dogs about how people make decisions to do things, but they all agree on one unifying principle.
It’s been studied for decades now, all around the world. We know this to be true. What we value determines. Everything we do, not something sometimes big things, not small things. Every single thing a human brain decides is filtered through our values. So you had, it’s not a choice. You have
Justin Brady: this. It’s just how we work.
You have this funny story in your book [00:08:00] about Bob and Sally and I think this is a probably a good segue to get to what value graphics are. Can you briefly tell, ’cause I have a ton to ask you, but can you briefly tell about the Bob and Sally story and kind of describe. Well, basically you demographically targeted Bob and Sally, but you actually got a value based sellers and you really didn’t know it at first.
David Allison: I. Yeah. So, you know, I started this journey. It’s a word everybody, everybody’s on a journey these days. So I started my journey, um, uh, because I had a marketing company and we focused specifically on high-end real estate development. So condo towers and resort communities and things like that. And like anything in the world of business, the first smart thing to do is sit down and say, who are we making this thing for?
And the time and place I was doing it, it was inevitably aging baby boomers who are selling their single family home in the suburbs and moving to high. Uh, you know, condos or, or apartments, a stacked urban environment, as we like to say in that industry. Uh, and [00:09:00] so we would profile these folks, and inevitably these Bob and Sally profiles would come up.
There were aging baby boomers who had a lot of money. They were the ones who were gonna buy this stuff. So we go and spend a bunch of money. And then the cool thing about that industry, about the real estate development industry is that it has an end. So you start a project and then three years later, you’re standing in a room meeting all the people who responded to your marketing.
And I would look around that room time, after time, after time, and the people in the room, there’s maybe 10% of them, were Bob and Sally and everybody else was all kinds of other people. You are looking around going, who the heck are all you here for? Why? How’d you get here? I didn’t talk to you. I didn’t build a strategy for you.
I didn’t buy anything in your channels. What? Thank you for coming. You made me look like a rock star. Thank you for buying a condo or a resort home, but I don’t get it. I don’t know why you’re here. Uh, and so fast forward through all this research we’ve done around the world now to determine the core values of humans and understand human behavior and how values are driving decision [00:10:00] making.
And now I can look back in retrospect at that room full of people. I. And say, ah, the 10% who looked like Bob and Sally, they were very obviously similar on the outside. Mm. But actually everybody in the room was similar. I was just using the wrong glasses, the wrong goggles. Yeah. Because on the inside. From a values perspective, if values are the only way that human brains know how to make decisions, something I had said or done in the marketing had triggered some values for this group of people, and that’s why they were all there.
They were identical to each other, value graphically, even though they were disparate. And I. And, and unlike, uh, from a demographic perspective.
Justin Brady: Yeah. And so you talk about in the book how much of this much of marketing is all like accidental impact. Oh, yeah. And a lot of, uh, people, a lot of marketing agencies like yourself kind of have that.
Well, I’m glad it went so well, but I literally have no idea why. And I do not know how to replicate this. Yeah. One of our
David Allison: [00:11:00] first clients was a, a large, um, global organization that makes a, well, they’re a competitor to North Face. They’re called Archer. Some of your listeners may know. And I met one of the guys who is, uh, the lead designer from, uh, this organization.
And, uh, we were having dinner at a friend’s house and talking about what do you do and what do you do? And he was telling me about how they have all these personas. It’s a familiar word to many in marketing. Yeah. Uh, that there’s meant to design their clothes and their stores and everything for these personas and like all personas.
I can’t remember what he told me. It was like, there’s a guy, his name’s Ted and he’s, you know, 24 years old and he likes to climb mountains and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, whatever it was he said. But the mystery to us as we go and stand in our stores and sure there might be a Ted there. Uh, but there’s also, you know, teenage girls who’ve saved their money up to buy their jacket for school this year.
And there’s senior citizens who are into rock climbing and mountain climbing. And, and so like, why are we focused on what’s, why are they all there [00:12:00] first? And why are we spending all of our time and money on this one guy named Ted, this fictitious persona when there’s something else going on? And so. That was, that was one of our first big clients where we were able to go out and globally show what was the connective tissue and how was it, uh, for all those people in those stores.
Why were they there? How could you see them on the inside instead of the outside? Yeah. And then how did that change from one country to another in one part of the world to another? Was it always the same things that. Or bringing people in, or was it different based on the values of different parts of the world?
So that was a fascinating project.
Justin Brady: So most people are familiar with demographic data because we’ve used it forever. Um, male, female, gen Z, millennials, boomers, you know, you, I mean, there’s a lot of demographic. Uh, breakdowns we can use, but does, does, that’s demographics, right? But in, in value graphics, what do the breakdowns look like?
Hmm.
David Allison: There’s 56 core [00:13:00] human values. And so the next question everybody has is, well, what are they and how did you get those? So I’ll give you a few examples. I won’t read you a whole list, but they’re things like ambition. And personal growth and family and belonging and relationships and environmentalism and social standing and health and wellbeing.
These are the things that drive the decisions and emotions and behaviors behind everything that we do. And how we found them is by going out and talking to 750,000 people around the world getting, in fact, you know what I’m gonna scoop for you here on the Justin Brady Show. We’re we’re creeping up to a million.
But I’m holding back on saying it ’cause I’m gonna, you know, I wanna make a big noise about it when we hit a million. So somewhere between 750,000 and a million people that we’ve talked to. Wow, that’s great. Measures what their core values are around the world with more accuracy than you need for a PhD across 180 countries.
And we take everything they told us. And if you think about it, like Halloween candy, you know, your kid comes home pill case full of candy, we dumped all the data out on the, on the [00:14:00] dining room table and you start to sort it into piles. You stand back and you go, well, okay. Um, well, one pile could be all the full-sized chocolate bars and one pile could be just the lollipops and one could be chewing gum, and so on, and so on and so on.
So we did that with all this data from all around the world, and we found that there’s 56 piles. There’s 56 core values that are driving the behaviors and decisions and emotions of everybody on earth. That’s the 56 piles. But the Halloween candy, uh, metaphor keeps on giving here because that pile of, um, full-sized chocolate bars, they’re all different.
So when we say belonging, for example, uh, there’s 912 kinds of belonging that we have codes for in the database. So when we work with a organization, we can say, you know, belonging is ranking overindexing for your target audience. It’s a really important value. And what they mean by that is this. So we can get really super precise around [00:15:00] how those values are showing up in the lives of the people that we’re profiling.
Justin Brady: No, that’s absolutely fascinating. You, uh, you also mentioned in the book that as you were sifting through all this information, AI was not used. You make a point to say, we did not use ai. We did this manually. We did this hand by hand. Why? Why? You know, in, in the rush of ai, everyone’s trying to make the next AI thing.
And it’s like the big buzzword. Why, right now? Why did you distance yourself from AI and machine learning?
David Allison: That’s a great question and one nobody has ever asked before, but it’s important to us. What we’re trying to do in a larger sense here is, yeah, we’re trying to make a B and help companies make a B, and stuff’s way more accurate if you’re gonna spend money trying to engage and attract and influence people.
What we’re really trying to do is to bring our shared humanity, our values, the [00:16:00] thing that makes us human back into the boardrooms of the nation and back into the boardrooms of the world. And if we’re gonna do that, we need to. Maintain humanity and humanness in our product. Hmm. So this is, um, the difference between, uh, you know, store-bought chocolate chip cookies that come in a pack of 36 and the chocolate chip cookies that your grandma made one at a time with the best ingredients in the world.
Yeah. Uh, we wanted to make sure that we weren’t becoming. The thing that we’re fighting against, which is the dehumanization of business. Because listen, I’m gonna ramble here for a second on this, because we have spent decades in our boardrooms erasing any. Trace of humanity that we can find because it’s risky, it’s messy, it’s illogical, irrational, emotional human behavior is a nightmare to try and put onto a spreadsheet.
That’s true. And so [00:17:00] therefore, it’s politically unwise and risky to kind of include it in our decision making process. So corporations love looking at. Data to make decisions. It’s the love language of organizations is data. And so they all sit around on a table, the CMO and the CTO and the CEO and all the other Cs, they all sit around and they talk about data.
Yeah. And they make decisions, but the thing they’re not considering is all these decisions they’re making is about people. Right. It’s about humans. Peace needs to be around the table. In fact, I’m calling for, uh, companies to consider in the this day and age where we add another C-Suite executive every 20 minutes.
I think it’s time for a chief values officer, someone who’s responsible for making sure the organization is focused on the values shared by the stakeholders of the organization. That should
Justin Brady: be
David Allison: the
Justin Brady: CMO, right?
David Allison: But no, it shouldn’t be. You don’t think so? Because, because the, the all functions inside [00:18:00] an organization should have to do with the values that are shared by all the people an organization touches.
I mean
Justin Brady: No, that’s a good point. So, truthfully, it should be the ceo, but you know, the CEOs are busy golfing, so
David Allison: Yeah, they have like a, a lot of yachts to sale, and that’s very important. Busy, busy people. You gotta have someone
Justin Brady: to do that
David Allison: and have the photos taken in the Enquirer. Uh, you, those weird homes are not gonna be sat in on their own.
Right. They, they need, they, somebody’s gotta go down there and air ’em out every
Justin Brady: now. But that, that being said though, if you do want to pick me up in your private plane and put me on your yacht, then you’re very useful to me. Just, oh, we love is for the record. David will come with, with their
David Allison: toys. We’re happy with them.
Justin Brady: David will come with, um, so you do talk in the book about data overload and everyone’s obsession with big data, uh, which. Kind of, I mean, preach is, is kind of what I was thinking when I was reading this, but you know, you do, basically we have tons of data. We ha and no one, no one has any idea, no one know what to do, what to do with any of it.
It reminds me of some NSA. [00:19:00] Guy, um, I, he was some expert being quoted on some show years ago, and then basically they were talking about big data and he is like, what all these idiots fail to understand is that all the government collecting this is, ’cause he was an NSA guy. He’s like the government collecting all this data.
All they’re really doing is just making a bigger haystack. And so they’re just creating more stuff to filter through that they don’t understand what they’re looking at and they’re missing the obvious stuff. Is, is that kinda what is, is that kind of echo. Yeah,
David Allison: for sure. I mean, I think it was like 15, 20 years ago, somebody sent out a memo to the entire world and said, data’s the new gold.
Uh, and so we all started collecting as much of it as we can. And we now have data about when people, you know, how much they put in their shopping carts online before they ditch, and if they ditch, when did they ditch, and how many seconds were they on this page and that page, and if they walk by our store, did we ping them with a message and are they geo-targeted back to the locations they came from?
And how do they feel about our brand yesterday and today, and. What are they gonna think about our brand tomorrow? And for goodness sake, we have data on [00:20:00] our customers and how often they burp. I swear we do. Yeah. I swear we know we probably abs You’re probably right. There’s a burp index. I know there is out there.
Somebody’s collecting that. No doubt, no doubt. Uh, and so you sit in these rooms and, and it’s absolute data paralysis. I’ve, I’ve talked with companies, we’ve worked with companies where they’re like. We love what you’re doing, but we can’t digest any more data. We’re full and, and, and they just are sitting there staring at it all.
So it’s all interesting stuff. It’s all, I mean, you could put it under the umbrella of psychographics. We’ve talked about demographics. Let’s go into this psychographic piece. Psychographics is everything that’s not demographics. How often people have bought, how much they’ve spent, likes, preferences, beliefs, everything else is a psychographic because it all comes from exactly the same place, all of it, which is the past.
Because you wrote it down. If you wrote it down, it happened. And so it’s over and it’s historical [00:21:00] data, so that’s cool. It’s still important. You can see patterns in there, patterns in the noise. Let’s say these people tend to do these things this often and spend that much and like this about it and whatever.
Cool. But we’re all here trying to get somebody to do something in the future. We wanna look out the front of the car, not in the rear view mirror. Rear view mirror is useful. You couldn’t drive the car very well if you didn’t have one, but you don’t use it to navigate your way forward. You need, you need it to take a look at where you’ve been, not where you’re going.
So to know where you’re going, you need to know how people are gonna decide the next thing that they do. Yeah. So you need the values piece. So you need all three demographics, psychographics, and value graphics. In fact, we, as a, a little mnemonic, we, we refer to that as a three legged stool. Mm-hmm. Of audience insights.
You need all three.
Justin Brady: And you talk about neurological programming in the book, that if we target people using their values, if, if, if that is our primary focus. They’re neurologically programmed to chase what they value. [00:22:00] And so if I frame my products, then if I communicate, uh, my services and I give people more of what they value from a company standpoint, uh, is it, is it too much to say?
They almost have, they almost have no choice but to do business with me.
David Allison: Yeah. Kind of, kind of, I mean. There is a piece inside your brain called the prefrontal cortex, and inside the prefrontal cortex, there’s an even smaller little piece called the insula and the insula. ISS only job is to sift and sort all the incoming data, the sight and sounds and smells and memories and everything that the brain can use and say, okay, if that’s what we know.
What are we gonna do here? We gotta decide whether we’re gonna marry that one or that one, or take this job or that job, or choose that can of soup or that can of soup. The only way our brain knows how to do that is by looking at the present situation and comparing it against our values. Values are the filter that our brain neurologically uses [00:23:00] to figure out what we’re gonna do with every single decision.
You don’t get to opt out. It’s how human brains operate. So if that’s the case and you hold something up in front of somebody and say, here’s something that you value, humans are gonna go, whoa. Hey, I need more of that. And they’re gonna run towards that thing. And if you hold something up that says, this might not be great for.
Something that you value, they’re going to just get all anxious. Your brain, your brain sends okay, that thing’s gotta go away. Get that off the radar and, and, and to incent you to make that go away. We’re gonna make you feel anxiety and fear and that’s only gonna stop after you get that thing outta here.
And so your brain issues commands and says, go towards the things that makes you happy. That’s gonna be the value stuff that is good for us, and run away from anything that might harm the value. It’s our GPS system. So, yeah, uh, give people more of what they value. And they will gravitate towards you. All things being equal, you can’t [00:24:00] charge 20 times more than everybody else for a comparable project and expect that values are gonna save you.
That’s just for that business. But all things being equal, people will pay more. In fact, we started tracking what we call return on values instead of ROI or in addition to ROI. ROV is how much more people will pay in various product categories for something that aligns with their values. And across the board it varies from one product category to another, but across the board, on average, you can expect a 12% ROV give people.
A little bit of what they value a little bit more. Tell them this is for them. Talk to their values, and on average, you’re gonna get their permission to charge as much as 12% more than the next guy. Let me give you a real concrete example on that one because it’s fun. Yeah, no, sure. Go ahead. Oreo cookies. I.
My favorite brand of cookies, I keep using them as an example. In case one day somebody from Oreo is listening and they call me up and go, David, let’s give you a lifetime sponsorship. Here’s how many [00:25:00] cookies do you need? Double stuff. Double stuffed, or the single stuffed ones. Yeah. So Oreo cookies last year made uh, $4 billion.
It’s a lot of cookies. We found for everyday repeat purchase items, people will pay 8% more if it aligns with their values. So all Oreo cookies has to do is change their packaging up a little bit, figure out a couple of words here and there that they can throw into their marketing platform. Find a way to say to people, we see you, we hear you.
We know what’s important to you. And people will tolerate an 8% price lift, which on $4 billion is about $320 million. That’s worth, yeah. Taking a stab at it. Even if this doesn’t work, what harm have we caused? So
Justin Brady: I, I’m gonna transition here in a bit to like manipulation ’cause I know you get that question.
And, um, so I’m gonna get there. But really quickly, just to illustrate this point, I. [00:26:00] Values. Uh, just just to your point, and I didn’t pick up on it probably until I started talking to you years ago, but values absolutely do Trump other things that should be fairly obvious. Rita McGrath, who’s been on this show before, gives this example in her book about a CEO.
Who, uh, I, I don’t know, I can’t remember all the details off the top of my head, but the long story, the short version is a board brought a CEO on, said, you can’t do this thing. He said, absolutely I can and I’ll do it. And they said, fine, if you can do it, we’re gonna hire you. And then he absolutely did it and, and like a year, and then they fired him because the board president was so mad that someone proved him wrong.
He didn’t, he didn’t value, uh, making money in the organization. He valued something that had, that basically charged his own ego. Yeah. And I, I’ve seen this before. I, I, um, when I was in college, I closed a huge, all these sales. I was leading in sales and I ended up getting fired because, uh, I ticked off my boss.
And then meanwhile you have other CEOs like, [00:27:00] um. I think Peter Drucker talks about, I think it was Ag Laffy, the p and g guy. Maybe it was someone else. But Drucker talks about, uh, a leadership figure that was in a board meeting and he said, uh, it sounds like we’ve all come to an agreement, right? To his board.
And they said, yeah, oh yeah, we have. And he says, great. Then I suggest we, we dismiss and find areas we disagree and come back and disagree on some stuff. Stuff. So you, you have people that, like CEOs that we just assume, oh, they’re all about the money, and some of them will gladly take a few million dollar bath just to save their own ego and their own decisions as Rita illustrates.
So, uh, I, I, I would assume those CEOs had very different values and the reason their consultants and partners missed it is because they didn’t see that.
David Allison: I think so. I mean, we run into it sometimes. Um, do I tell this story? I don’t. Okay. Damn it. We’re gonna tell story. We run into it sometimes with clients where [00:28:00] somebody inside the organization sees themself and their place in there as the customer whisperer.
Justin Brady: Ah, yeah. They’ve built that internal brand and they don thinking
David Allison: database coming in and telling them what is really going on in the hearts and minds of their customers because, dammit, I’ve been in this business for 45 years and I know what these people want. I don’t need any data. Tell me this, and what they’re really saying is that their values around social standing are being threatened.
Oh, interesting. They, they don’t wanna see their ambition threatened that there’s certain values that are coming into play here that are being threatened. And when we run into the customer whisperer, we just back away because there’s nothing we can do to change how people react. To the world right.
Around their
Justin Brady: values. ’cause their values aren’t gonna change, right? Their values are the customer whisper, their values are being right. And if, if you basically, um, [00:29:00] creating more problems for yourself, if you prove that they’re not right. Yeah. Because then they’ll constantly, you know, I’ve seen clients like this, that, uh, day one, I, I, there was, I remember one CEOI was working with, and I said, this isn’t gonna last because one of the leaders on your team, um, is, is that customer whisper person.
Um, no, I didn’t tell them that. I told someone else. Um, yeah, that was, because that would’ve been dumb to tell them that. But, you know, day one I was like, this is not gonna last. And sure enough, that person was working against me from day one. Yeah. Uh, they didn’t care about the project. They cared about how they were perceived in the organization.
But you do bring up a good point here and we’ll end on this. Um, do you see outside of the customer whisperer, do you see a lot of resistance? Do you see people pushing back against this idea or even anyone concerned about manipulation? And the reason I ask this is because I see quite often, and I think it’s for different purposes, but I see quite often people really pushing aggressively against me when I say we need to identify who [00:30:00] your customer is.
We have to get them, you know, very focused on them. And then we have to understand what makes them tick and who they are. I use your language now. We have to understand what they value. Uh, and I, you know, have a little few tips that you’ve shared with me privately on how to do that, but I see a lot of resistance for that.
Do you see that too?
David Allison: Yeah. I don’t think it’s resistance against understanding customers better. I think it’s resistance around change. It’s, I’ve always done it this way. I’m running a million miles an hour. I have 17 billion, um, reports and all these things I have to do and all these deadlines, and now you’re asking me to rethink how I think about people.
That just seems like far, far too much. Sure, and, and you know, I am, in retrospect, should have maybe. Spent all this time and money inventing a slightly better version of things that people already knew about, as opposed to a brand new thing that no one’s ever heard of [00:31:00] before. Uh, because it would’ve seemed like a little bit less of a herculean task to try and convince people that Yeah, but then you, but then you, you wouldn’t
Justin Brady: be able to sleep at night though.
David Allison: Yeah, there’s that. And you know what? We are making head wave. Uh, I, I, I had great news. Um. This is about four weeks ago now. We’ve, we’ve, we’re now included in one of the most widely used marketing textbooks on the planet right there next to demographics. Ooh, that’s cool. Page on value graphics. So the next generation of marketers coming out of our colleges and universities around the world are never gonna know a world or a time where understanding what people truly care about.
Is a foreign content. Do you ever
Justin Brady: like, that’s pretty cool. Like you said, it’s a Herculean effort. Herculean, how do we even say that? Herculean, Herculean, whatever. Like you said, it’s a really, really big, big idea. Do you ever wonder if you will ever see the full weight of what you’ve created? I. In your lifetime?
Or do you think perhaps No, I won’t. You don’t think so? I [00:32:00] know I
David Allison: won’t. And it’s actually one of the things that weighs most heavily on me. So maybe we can, um, instead of ending with a plug for my book, which is called The Death of Demographics, you can get it on Amazon or anything else. Oh, we’re gonna plug it again, so don’t you worry.
Leave a, a, a plug, uh, this way. I am thinking about legacy here. You know, we’ve built this first ever database for the planet of what we all care about, of what drives us, what our values are. Uh, we donate our work to large, um, multi, you know, uh, huge organizations that are doing good work on a global scale to help them out.
Um, but what happens when I’m not here anymore, when, uh, I go off to the big, you know, data analysis lab in the sky, uh. And, uh, this thing has to have a life beyond me, so I’m starting to have conversations with. Um, some very interesting organizations about what happens to, who do I give the keys to the car to, and in what format will [00:33:00] that be?
Do we make this into software or a SaaS app? Do we, how do we turn this into something that’s more broadly available? Because what drives us, yes, we’re wanna make some money and help people make money, but I’ve, and I’ve already, I’ve already referenced this once, what really drives us is. This world right now is, is falling to pieces.
We’re we’re so divisive and divided on so many issues, and yet through all of it, through all the ageism and racism and sexism and homophobia, through all the politics and the Black Lives Matter and ESG and DEI and all of these things going on, there’s one common thread. And that it’s all about people, and people are all about their values.
So this is a unifying force. Yeah. Wow. And a time where the world really, really needs it. Hmm. And so I wanna make sure that this doesn’t end with me.
Justin Brady: Yeah, no, that’s, that’s a really good place to leave it. But, uh, we do absolutely need to plug the [00:34:00] book. The book is The Death of Demographics. You are David Allison, creator of the Value Graphics database.
David, if people are excited, they wanna learn more, they wanna get the book, they wanna reach out to you, what is the most simple and straightforward way to do that?
David Allison: Hmm. Nothing in my life is simple and straightforward, but uh, LinkedIn is a place that I like to live most. So if you’re looking for me on social, find me there.
You can find me by just David Allison or Value Graphics. We’ll get you there. And we have two websites. Um, one is value graphics.com. That’s the Value Graphics Research Company, where we do commission studies for clients. And then there’s David Allison inc.com, which is where my thought leadership work, my books, my um, my public speaking work that all kind of lives over on David Allison inc.com.
So depending on what you are interested in learning more about, um. You might want to go to one or the other of those.
Justin Brady: David, thank you so much for coming on the show and to everybody listening obviously, thank you for listening [00:35:00] and joining us in this discussion. Do not forget to subscribe to the show, David and everybody else.
Thank you so much. For being on the Justin Brady Show, I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.
