Beyond the Purchase is excited to announce a partnership with Zenzi Communications, a public relations and marketing company based in San Diego, in order to further our understanding of how businesses and consumers can form mutually beneficial relationships based on values and psychological need satisfaction. A primary goal of the partnership is to help bridge the gap between the often disconnected worlds of academic research and the application of scientific findings to real world situations.
The quizzes and surveys offered on Beyond The Purchase are primarily designed to help people become happier through better use of their money, as well as to advance the scientific understanding of how and why consumers make the financial decisions they do. In addition to dealing with individual consumers, however, a full understanding of the science of money involves another factor – the businesses and entities that sell their products and services to the consumer. While the goal of the consumer is presumably obtaining maximum utility from their purchases, the goal of the seller has traditionally been thought to be turning a profit from their offerings. Depending on the company and its product, the psychological needs and happiness of the consumer may or may not be at the forefront of the seller’s priority list. More and more, however, businesses are realizing that in order to prosper in today’s consumer-centric economy, listening to and satisfying the psychological needs of their customers is important, and perhaps vital, to their financial success.
Zenzi’s Social Values practice seeks to identify relationships between a person’s psychological profile and the decisions they make as consumers. This information allows Zenzi to make specific, targeted recommendations to companies that want to better understand the needs and motivations of their current customer base, as well as identify new market opportunities. The Social Values team is comprised of experts from the fields of marketing, academic research, and data science. What separates Zenzi’s approach from other companies that have done similar psychographic segmentations is that the Social Values practice is grounded in established psychological theory. Largely based on Schwartz Values theory, Zenzi’s ValueBase is the world’s most comprehensive database of empirically derived values-based insights, and is the foundation helping business align their brand’s core values with those of their customers.
The partnership between Beyond The Purchase and Zenzi will help to integrate consumer psychology and happiness research with real world applications. Traditionally, many marketers have relied on guess work or limited data sources to gain insight into how consumers think and act. Leveraging data from Beyond the Purchase, as well as other partners such as Ranker and YourMorals, Zenzi will be able to obtain a more complete picture of the modern consumer, and apply these findings from a psychological perspective. While there is no shortage of data available to marketers today, there is a glaring deficit in how that data is interpreted into meaningful, actionable insights. The combined efforts of Beyond the Purchase and Zenzi will allow researchers to uncover the stories behind the data, not just how consumers behave, but why they behave in that way.
From the standpoint of the consumer, the partnership will allow for better insight into how scientific findings translate to real world purchase decisions. This understanding will help Beyond the Purchase further their goal of better educating and informing consumers as to how they can make decisions that will satisfy their psychological needs, maximize utility from their purchases, and ultimately make them happier.
It is for this reason we at Beyond The Purchase are excited to collaborate with Zenzi with the goal to uncover more insights into how businesses and consumers can create win-win relationships based on satisfaction of value-based goals and psychological needs. To learn more about your values register with Beyond the Purchase (and if you register with Facebook we will tell you how happy your status messages are) and take the Social Values Scale and the Schwartz Values Survey. After each quiz, we will provide you with personalized feedback and happiness tips. Your responses will also help researchers understand the connection between value-based goals and happiness.
Graham Hill, lead researcher at Zenzi communications and former PWB lab member, contributed to this blog. To learn more, visit zenzi.com and sign up for their newsletter, or email [email protected].
