Mapping human values: enhancing social marketing through obituary data mining

Traditionally, marketers have sought to influence behavior and choice with the ultimate end of promoting the interests of employers or clients. The domain of marketing was convincing individuals and groups to purchase certain products over others, to spend rather than save, and to upgrade after deciding to buy. An advantage of drawing from actual obituaries is that we avoid the possibility of obituary writers being influenced by researcher expectations and the distorting influence of survey participants’ apathy, carelessness, or desire to give witty responses. Individuals’ desires, goals, and values are organized in a relatively stable hierarchy with more specific, concrete, local, and instrumental preferences at the bottom and more general, abstract, global, and intrinsic values at the top. Laddering is a technique for exploring individuals’ value-hierarchies. In a common interview-based version of laddering, the marketer asks a consumer why she, for instance, purchased a product.