Introducing the Emotional Logic Life Values Survey

Our values are our deepest held beliefs, the things that make us us. They affect every decision we make, whether we forego our careers for our family or whether making that deal means that junior’s bath time might be a little late tonight.

Understanding these basic building blocks of personality is an important part of creating a brand that works for an audience. Get it wrong and people don’t want to be associated with a brand, get it right and loyalty won’t be far behind. The Emotional Logic Life Values Survey is a way of assessing these basic bits of information, from a relatively simply online test, that you yourself can take by clicking here we can assess what’s important to you and what isn’t.

Take our recent survey of British spirit drinkers. We looked at people who regularly drink Whisky, Gin and Vodka and assessed their Life Values against the UK benchmark and we found some very interesting results.  Who do you think would be the most Care Giving? Who would be the most Traditional? And who would be the most Pleasure Seeking. Before you answer those questions you might want to take a look at this paper that goes into a bit more depth on the system and the values themselves.

The graph above shows the indices of the values of spirit drinkers against the UK average. A score higher than 1.0 indicates a high level of that value existing within the product category, a score below 1.0 indicates a low level of that value existing within the product category.

The first thing to note is that generally spirit drinkers share some common groupings; they are generally low on Tolerance and Freedom and high on Traditionalism, Excitement and Power. These are most probably the core values of the category. Whilst there are differences in the scores of the individual types of drinks the trend is the same. In terms of brand building, these are potential values for a brand to sit on; however, we need to be aware that any marketing may end up helping the category rather than the brand.

One obvious exception would be Traditionalism and Whisky, where although all spirit drinkers seem to be high on this value Whisky drinkers are extremely high with an index score of 1.5. We could therefore look to position a Whisky brand on Traditionalism – as many currently are – quite safely.

There are also see some contrasts within the values, Care Giver being the most obvious example. Here we see that Vodka and Whisky drinkers are marginally below the UK average, with indices of 0.9 and 0.8 respectively. Gin drinkers however, are significantly above the UK average, with an index score of 1.3. One possible explanation is the high number of women within this sample and their higher propensity for care giving. However, this is certainly a life value a Gin brand should take a carefully look at if it was looking to reposition itself.

The same can be said for Vodka drinkers and Pleasure Seeking whereby both Gin drinkers and Whisky drinkers are the same as the UK average however, Vodka drinkers are above the UK average with an index of 1.2.

Understanding the Life Values of your customers can provide fresh insight and the potential to create a deeper connection with your customer’s life beyond your brand. Providing communication which consistently "just feels right" to them. Being able to clearly and easily understand the values of your brand's customers, the category and your competitor's customers provides a fantastic opportunity to find “fresh air” for your brand to breathe. Ultimately, The Emotional Logic Life Values Survey allows brands to tap into something deeper and more important, the values by which we live our lives.