EP 2: Digging Deep on Motives to Meet Your Customer’s “Invisible” Needs - Cheri Anderson

Welcome to the second episode of LIFT podcast!  On today’s episode, Allison is joined by global researcher Cheri Anderson of the Values and Lifestyles Program (VALS) from Menlo Park, California, to unravel motives and their impact on everything from building a business to positioning a product. Based on her 25-year experience applying research findings to a variety of sectors from Nigeria to Japan, Cheri reveals the connection between self-image and VALs personality types to explain why some technologies are readily accepted and others miss the mark.

Allison and Cheri contrast longstanding academic theories with today’s business realities to consider novel approaches to marketing, sales, and product design. Learn common mistakes to avoid when trying to analyze customer needs, and what it means to be a rebel, trendy or an achiever and how that impacts motivations and buying decisions. Dig deeper into understanding your customers and gain the rewards of meeting their “invisible” needs. For all these incredibly rich insights, join us today! 

 

 

Key Points From This Episode:

• Why viewing customers from a psychological standpoint is important for business leaders.
• How motives affect customers and business leaders alike.
• The difference between motives and psychographics.
• The role that motives play in decision making.
• How tech executives are different from executives in other industry sectors.
• How trendy and traditional are two sides of the same coin.
• Some insights into the dynamic computer buying group.
• Where differentiation can be found when looking at people types.
• How motives and self-image are linked.
• Some of the common mistakes when thinking about motives in the business world.
• Why it’s not enough to ask direct questions to uncover motives.
• How to identify different groups of people according to their motives.
• What competitive substitution is and why it is important.

 

Digging Deep on Motives to Meet Your Customer’s “Invisible” Needs - Cheri Anderson 

Guest Biography:

Cheri Anderson helps organizations worldwide to make decisions that depend on how populations will respond to new products, services, and policy initiatives. Whether the decision relates to a new consumer-electronics gadget, a service, or even efforts to encourage green lifestyles or responsible citizenship, Cheri brings big-data-based insights about different types of people and the attitudes and behaviors they exhibit, and how they are likely to respond. In her role as Global Director of Research for Strategic Business Insights' VALS service, she's aided advertisers, broadcasters and TV makers; nonprofits and governments; automotive industries, real-estate developers and many more. Her findings are backed by surveys she conducts of populations of multiple countries, using algorithms that segment a population into groups that have distinct psychologies. Strategic Business Insights (SBI) is an employee-owned SRI International spin-off. VALS is a practice group of SBI.

 

 

 

Tweetables:

“There are two aspects to conforming; you can conform by being traditional, or you can conform by being trendy.” — Cheri Anderson [0:06:30]

“The computer buyer is like a moving target. Who is this person?” — Cheri Anderson [0:11:36]

“The reason you're looking at motives and these forces is because that's where the rich rewards lie, and you need that context.” — Allison J Taylor [0:30:28]

“You can't know what the competitive substitute is unless you really know what's driving the behavior.” — Cheri Anderson [0:18:50]

“Where is the crack in the egg? Where do I see the differentiation that I need to follow up for my next product design?” — Cheri Anderson [0:14:41.9]

“We are all pretty fractured. You've got the part of yourself who you think you are. You have the part of yourself who other people expect you to be.” — Cheri Anderson [0:16:49.4]

“You’ll find risk-taking in unexpected pockets.” — Cheri Anderson [0:17:50] 

“To be trendy is essentially an imitative position.”— Cheri Anderson [0:08:13.2]

“People tend to think that trendy and traditional are opposites in terms of the core force. They actually cohere and come together. Both are forces of belonging.” Cheri Anderson [0:06:16.2]

“When you're doing whatever marketing you're doing, you really have to think about what's moving and what's not moving.” Cheri Anderson [0:11:39.3]

“Self-image is how someone sees themselves and conversely, a mirror, how other people see them.” Cheri Anderson [0:15:38.9]

“Some motives might be wanting to be safe and secure in a decision they make.” — Allison J. Taylor [0:05:07]

“All of us are doing PhDs on a daily basis, in terms of keeping up with the technology trends and the business trends simultaneously, and having to go deep into that and come back up.” Allison J. Taylor [0:12:02.1]

“In the personality type, you want to look for the things that don't change.” Allison J. Taylor [0:13:37.7]

 

Links Mentioned in Today’s Episode:

VALS - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/VALS

Thought Marketing — https://www.thoughtmarketing.com/

Thought Marketing email — [email protected]

 

Additional Information:

To contact Cheri Anderson, contact us at: [email protected]

VALS Survey (including ability to take the survey):

http://www.strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/presurvey.shtml

Case Studies from a VALS Perspective:

http://www.strategicbusinessinsights.com/vals/whyology/