Allegra Stratton has written in the Guardian about the issue of Values segmentation in the context of the recent events involving News International and alleged phone hacking. This is the second article they have written on values segmentation. George Monbiot also referred to the WWF Common Cause Values research in an article in October 2010, which I have reviewed here and which shows the interesting debates within the Values research community.
The important point to make is this research is not just for politicians, but also for public bodies to better understand their communities and to address, for example, public health, behaviour change and community cohesion challenges. Yesterday the government confirmed local government’s important new public health role. Many Councils will end up inheriting duplicated local geodemographic segmentation based on both MOSAIC and Health ACORN, when what is now needed is to understand values too. Their existing geodemographics will tell them where key target groups are and how they behave, when what they need next is to understand the why in more detail and the needs and motivations that drive people to act the way they do. Addressing issues around supporting and improving ability is just not enough in a complex modern society.
Previous postings in this blog set out many of the uses of Values segmentation. What the Guardian report shows is that this is an increasingly important way of understanding communities from a public policy perspective.
Charlie Mansell is Research and Development Officer for The Campaign Company. If you want to see what your own primary values set is, why not take the simple Values Questionnaire here.