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Developmental relationship marketing based on typical evolutionary changes across the lifespan in people’s worldviews, needs, motivations and general strategies used in satisfying needs. These changes tend to occur in predictable sequences, time frames and in generally predictable ways.
DRM breathes life into the cold statistics of consumer research and databases by bringing data points together to form pictures of consumers as they really are: complex adaptive systems – the term scientists use in referring to entities that change behavior to adapt to changes in their environments.
Consumers ceaselessly undergo adaptive changes, challenging researchers and marketers to keep pace. However, the latter often fail to keep pace with consumers’ adaptive changes because their models of consumer behavior are more closely patterned after simple adaptive systems of nonorganic structures like engines, levers and clocks. This leads to less efficient tracking of consumers’ behavior – thus, the frequent disconnects between predictions of what consumers will do and what they end up doing.
Traditional research takes snapshots of consumers – moments frozen in time as statistical arrays in renderings called psychographics. The suffix graphics connotes the static nature of psychographics, which ignores contextual influences on consumer behavior. Research modeled after complex adaptive systems produces psychodynamic data in the equivalent of streaming videos of consumers that reflects contextual influences on consumer behavior.
A traditional marketing perspective sees consumers in terms of cause-and-effect predictive models of their behavior: "What action will get what result." However, the behavior of complex adaptive
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systems does not always reflect direct cause-and-effect relationships. They often act in discontinuous ways, that is, in ways not predictable by prior events or conditions. However, knowledge of developmental influences on consumer behavior informs a marketer of the general nature of the discontinuities likely to crop up in marketplace behavior.
The Conceptual Foundation of DRM
The conceptual foundation of DRM consists of five systems of basic life values that serve as the wellspring of primary core needs upon which a person’s quality of life depends. These values are behavioral constants: they do not change from one generation to the next, though the ways in which they influence behavior does change across the lifespan. The five primary basic life value systems from which all core needs flow are:
Identity Values: self-awareness and perpetuation of the physical and metaphysical self
Relationship Values: family, social, organizational and belief-system connections
Purpose Values: reason for being
Adaptation Values: knowledge and skills
Energy Values: health, well-being and functionality
Needs generated by these five core needs systems differ by season of life in somewhat predictable ways. Because season of life correlates with years of life, it is possible to know quite a lot about consumers that even they cannot tell you about simply by know their ages.
The Four Basic Premises of DRM... Next >>
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Ageless Marketing Explained 