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For decades, marketers have searched for better ways to connect brand purpose, audience insight, messaging, and media strategy. Until now, the pieces rarely clicked together in a way that drove both meaning and measurable performance. Values-Driven Marketing (VDM) changes that.
At its core, VDM draws on Behavioral Science, which defines values as what matters most to us in life — motivations such as Tradition (family, heritage, stability), Freedom (creativity, independence), or Achievement (success, recognition, luxury). These deep-rooted drivers are universal, predictive of behavior, and more powerful than surface-level demographics.
Why Values-Driven Marketing Matters Now
Consumer expectations are rising. Ipsos reports that 69% of people in major markets buy brands that reflect their personal values, up from 53% a decade ago. Google Cloud and Harris Poll found that 82% of shoppers prefer brands whose values align with their own.
Meanwhile, the media environment has grown more fragmented. Campaigns now span nine or more channels on average, while platforms demand a steady flow of fit-for-platform creative. VDM gives marketers a unifying framework that sharpens targeting, builds coherence, and cuts through the noise.
The Values-Driven Marketing Performance Advantage
VDM is not theory. WARC (World Advertising Research Center), the leading authority on advertising effectiveness for marketers and brands, in partnership with Aletheia, shows that ads aligned with an audience’s values consistently outperform misaligned ones. Results included:
Aletheia’s work with GoHealth Urgent Care proved the advantage in-market. Ads targeted to specific ValuesTypes such as Freedom or Achievement delivered 82%–100% higher CTRs compared to demographic-only targeting.
How Values-Driven Marketing Works
Values-Driven Marketing brings together the who, how, and where of strategy:
Aletheia, the leading values-driven marketing intelligence company and media agency in the U.S., operationalizes this approach. Its patented AI platform, Pluralytics, reads messaging for values signals and matches them to values-driven audiences — boosting both resonance and performance.
Why marketers must consider Values-Driven Marketing
In an era of attention scarcity and rising ROI pressure, VDM gives brands a sharper bullseye. It helps marketers connect authentically, perform more effectively, and unlock new growth.
