David Allison is a human values expert, global researcher and best-selling author. He is focused on changing the way we understand ourselves, the people around us, and those we hope to engage with our work.

david allison is the founder of the Valuegraphics Project, the first global inventory of core human values. He has made values into a measurable business metric; a new kind of insight that helps organizations succeed in today’s Values Economy.

David speaks internationally and helps big brands connect with people by honoring their values. INC Magazine named his last book one of the ten best leadership books of the year, and his new book The Death of Demographics: Valuegraphic Marketing for a Values-Driven World will be published in November 2022.

David Allison spent his career working on campaigns for some of the biggest brands in the world, building an award-winning marketing creative firm, and writing three influential books on communications strategy.

All this left him questioning a fundamental concept of marketing: in a post-demographic era when age, gender, income, and education no longer restrict how we choose to live, he wondered, why are we still using demographics to understand how target audiences behave?

David Allison | Human Values Expert

David Allison sold his firm in 2015, and began work with a team of university researchers to launch, collect and analyze a half-million surveys about why groups of people behave the way they do. The data was immediately clear on two points.

First, demographics were a shockingly ineffective way to understand how groups behaved. More importantly, leveraging shared values turned out to be the most powerful way he’d ever seen to trigger behavior for anything.

Now, for the first time, there was accessible, customizable, empirical data that proved what we value determines what we do.

Further data analysis revealed that we waste 90% of our time and money trying to engage target audiences using demographics.

• What could we do with 90% of our financial and human resources re-deployed elsewhere?
• What if we only did things that people cared about?
• Wouldn’t the world be better off if everything was based on the values we share? 

David Allison can pinpoint the shared values of any group of people, anywhere on earth. 

And I can show my audience how to connect with those people, deep inside their hearts, like a trusted friend.

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