McKinsey Just Confirmed What Strategists Have Always Known
- Pam Radford
- Jul 17
- 5 min read
Updated: Sep 29
Turns out, values really do drive loyalty—and now we can finally target them.
As a strategist, there are things you just know intuitively. Seeing McKinsey spell it out in their State of the Consumer 2025 report this week felt like long-overdue confirmation:
"Brands that reflect a consumer's values are gaining loyalty—even when they aren't the lowest-priced or most convenient option." — McKinsey & Company
That line doesn't just describe a shift. It describes a reality that many of us in strategy have felt coming for years.
The Importance of Values in Brand Loyalty
We've always known values mattered. We just couldn't target them effectively. Every good strategist understands that values shape how people feel about brands. The best teams build thoughtful personas. They create decks full of aspiration, empathy, and insight. I've seen walls lined with posters of ideal customers—each one carefully imagined and beautifully articulated.
But when it came time to launch? Those personas often got left behind. Not because they weren't useful, but because they weren't actionable.
Media buyers couldn't target "values adventure over security." Lifecycle marketers couldn't trigger "seeks legacy and fairness." So those brilliant personas became just that—brilliant, and quietly sidelined.
The problem wasn't belief. It was tools.
What's Changed? AI, Meet Targeting
Today, we can finally act on what we've always known. Thanks to AI and psychographic mapping, we can now translate values—like independence, community, or personal responsibility—into real, targetable audiences. No cookies. No CRM. Just ZIP-code-level segments rooted in worldviews, not just web views.
It's not theoretical. It's working. For the first time, our strategy decks can flow all the way through to planning, creative, and measurement—without losing the soul of the insight.
The Industry's Catching On
The team at Lightspeed recently put a name to this shift: "value-spending." They found that consumers are increasingly spending based on what they believe, not just what they need.
"Consumers are aligning their spending with their values. Brand authenticity and shared beliefs now matter as much as product features or price." — Lightspeed, 2025 Consumer Report
Deloitte backs this up with hard numbers:
"Brands that act in alignment with customer values see 2x the level of trust and 3x the loyalty over time." — Deloitte, 2024 Global Marketing Trends
These aren't fringe insights. They're the new center of gravity. Values-based marketing is no longer a brand play—it's a growth strategy.
What This Looks Like in Practice
Here's a simplified comparison that's helped me explain this shift to brand and agency teams:
It's not just a smarter map. It's a better compass.
How This Works
Imagine a prominent pilates franchise testing this approach across different markets. Instead of targeting "women 25-54 interested in fitness," they could build campaigns around core values that vary by geography. For example:
Seattle (98199): Outdoor Lifestyle Focus
Value: "Outdoor Lifestyle" (Pacific Coast regional value)
Creative angle: "Find Strength for Everything You Love"
Message: Your body is made to move—keep it strong and flexible for the activities that bring you joy.
Boston (02145): Continuous Improvement Focus
Value: "Continuous Improvement" (Northeastern regional value)
Creative angle: "Stronger Every Class, Better Every Day"
Message: Pilates isn't just a workout—it's a long-term commitment to feeling your best.
Phoenix (85255): Communal Harmony Focus
Value: "Communal Harmony" (Mexican Frontier regional value)
Creative angle: "Stay Active with a Supportive Community"
Message: Join instructor-led classes where you'll find motivation, encouragement, and connection.
Same product. Same brand. But three entirely different value propositions that reflect what each community actually cares about. The question isn't whether this would work—it's whether you're ready to test it.
What Changes When Belief Comes First
The tactical implications are bigger than most teams realize:
For Strategy Teams: Your personas finally become media plans. That insight about "seeks meaningful connection" becomes a targetable audience segment in Phoenix's 85255 ZIP code, where "Communal Harmony" ranks as a top regional value.
For Creatives: The brief gets clearer. When you know your Seattle audience values "Outdoor Lifestyle" while your Phoenix audience values "Communal Harmony," you're not writing generic fitness copy anymore. You're writing to specific worldviews.
For Measurement: Success metrics shift from vanity to values. Instead of just tracking CTR, you're measuring resonance with value-aligned audiences and building lookalike segments based on shared beliefs, not just shared behaviors.
The Technology Behind It
The breakthrough isn't just conceptual—it's technical. Platforms like Lifemind.ai are using AI to map millions of data points (regional insights from socio-economic studies, census data, generational data) to ZIP-code-level psychographic profiles.
This means you can enrich your first-party customer data with valuegraphics data, input zip codes to get quick insights on a region, and more in minutes. No cookies, no CRM matching, no privacy concerns—just values-based audiences at scale.
What Success Could Look Like
The early signals are promising. When messaging aligns with core values, audiences respond differently. They engage more deeply. They remember more clearly. They feel more connected to brands that seem to understand what they actually care about.
More importantly, campaigns feel more authentic. When your Seattle outdoor enthusiast sees "Find Strength for Everything You Love" while your Phoenix community-focused customer sees "Stay Active with a Supportive Community," both audiences feel like you're speaking directly to them.
The question for strategists isn't whether values-based targeting works—it's whether you're ready to start experimenting with it.
Ready to Experiment?
For teams ready to test this approach, the path is clearer than you might think:
Start with one market, one value: Pick your strongest market and identify its top regional value. Build one campaign around that insight.
Test messaging variations: Create 2-3 creative approaches for the same value and measure which resonates most.
Expand methodically: Once you've proven the approach works, roll it out to additional markets with their respective values.
Measure differently: Track engagement and conversion by value alignment, not just demographic performance.
The technology is mature enough for testing, but new enough that early adopters have a real competitive advantage.
A note on applicability: This ZIP-code-based approach works best for B2C brands where customers live and shop in the same communities. For B2B marketers, especially in our remote-work reality where decision-makers may be scattered across regions while their companies are headquartered elsewhere, traditional demographic and firmographic targeting may still be more effective.
The question isn't whether this approach will become standard—it's whether you'll be leading the charge or following it.
The Strategic Shift
This isn't just a new targeting method—it's a fundamentally different approach to audience strategy. Instead of asking "Who are our customers?" we're asking "What do they believe?" Instead of building campaigns around what people do, we're building around what they value.
The best strategies have always been rooted in human truth. Now we finally have the tools to act on those truths at scale.
For strategists who've spent years advocating for deeper consumer understanding, this feels like validation. For planners who've been constrained by demographic boxes, it's liberation. For creatives who've been writing to avatars instead of actual motivations, it's inspiration.
The future of audience strategy isn't about better data—it's about better empathy, finally made actionable.
