by My friend and colleague, Josh Calder of the Foresight Alliance, passed on list of “Top 2011 Values for Moms and Dads are about the Same as Last Year” from the firm Iconoculture. They are global consumer research firm and I have followed and appreciated their work on values as I’ve done my research over the last dozen years. I thought it would be interesting to compare our perspectives using this short post.
They list 10 values: Family, loyalty, honesty, courtesy, authenticity, success, responsibility, equality, conscience and justice.
In the bullet points that follow, they observe: “the top 10 values….have changed very little in the past year.” Well, of course. A key point in ConsumerShift about the pace of values change is that it is very slow—significant chance can take a generation to unfold. It is hard to “catch” such change on short times scales like a year. Maybe one might pick up a “rapid” 1% shift from the previous year. So, no surprise on the consistency. If the change is happening more rapidly than that, it is likely that something other than values is being tracked, maybe attitudes or behaviors, which are more likely to change quickly.
My next reaction in looking at the list is to note some difference on what a value is: an individual view about what is most important in life that in turn guides decision-making and behavior. A key difference from many definitions is that I leave out distinctions between right and wrong. I leave that terrain to virtues. My view is that virtues are more stable (one might say timeless) and less likely to help in the quest to understand change over the long term, e.g., love. Looking at this list, I six of the ten into the category of virtues: conscience, courtesy, honesty, justice loyalty, responsibility. And this further reinforces the point that they haven’t changed over the last year….
For the four values our inventories share in common, they are spread across three of the four “New Dimensions Values Inventory” types: traditional, modern, and postmodern.” Family (family orientation in the NDVI) is traditional, equality is modern (before it morphs into its postmodern incarnation – diversity), success (achievement in the NDVI) is also modern, and authenticity is postmodern (same in NDVI).
It is important to note that I make no claims to mine being “correct.” Different researchers will have different interpretations, and that’s quite alright! A point I wanted to make beyond illustrating some differences is that I think the value of values (ahem – insert “laugh” here) is in the types. I think it is more useful to look at movements in the types – is there a shift afoot in traditional to modern, or modern to postmodern, or postmodern to integral? That will give us insight into changes visible in the consumer landscape. It’s difficult to discern changes from more or less random lists. Andy Hines
Leave a Reply