VANCOUVER, B.C.: Demographics are dead. Or at least dying.
That’s the argument at the heart of a global research project led by Canadian values researcher David Allison — and now the world is paying close attention.
Last week in New York, Allison became the first Canadian ever to win a Silver Apple Award, a 40-year-old honour presented by the Marketing Club of New York to recognize outstanding contributions to the future of marketing.
His win came in the rare and prestigious Innovation category, awarded only five times in the program’s history.
With previous Innovation honourees including Bonin Bough, Mayur Gupta and John Nardone, the Innovation Apple is a flag planted by the industry to mark transformation.
This year, that flag pointed North.
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Allison is being recognized for his work building the world’s first global database of human values, gathered from over a million surveys in 152 languages, and used to introduce a new marketing and business metric: Valuegraphics.
“We’ve had demographics and psychographics,” says Allison. “Now we have Valuegraphics — a third lens to truly understand what motivates people, based on the values they share.”
It’s an idea that’s quickly gaining traction.
The data is being used by brands like Google, PayPal, lululemon, and the United Nations Foundation to understand customers, citizens and employees in a post-demographic world. And it’s already appearing in textbooks used in business schools around the globe, training the next generation of marketers and policymakers to put shared human values at the centre of strategy.
This growing international interest just earned Allison another major invite: he was recently asked by Amazon to present his research to some of their largest global brand clients at the Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity, where he spoke alongside Roger Federer.
“Canada has always exported ideas before we celebrate them,” Allison says. “But this moment, with the award, the book deal and Cannes — it feels like something’s shifting.”
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That book deal — his third — was just signed with publishing giant Wiley, further cementing his work as a core part of the conversation about the future of marketing, sales, employee engagement, leadership — issues that all boil down to influencing what people do.
Whether this marks a long-overdue Canadian recognition for contributions on the world stage remains to be seen.
But for now, a new name sits beside the likes of Bough and Gupta — and it belongs to a researcher from Vancouver who’s helping the world rethink what it means to truly understand people.
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