Values based personas provide an X-ray of customer motivations and behaviours

Civic has recently worked with our longstanding associates, the behaviour change experts Social Engine, to develop a set of research based customer personas for Catalyst housing association.

What makes these personas special is that they have been developed based on research into Catalyst customers’ values.

Social Engine used the well established Personality Values Questionnaire (PVQ), a profiling framework that enables us to establish people’s behaviours on a spectrum of values between community minded versus self improving and adventurous versus traditional.

Values provide a more powerful tool for understanding customers than traditional demographics, such as age, culture, tenure or political affiliation, because values are directly linked to people emotions and behaviours, as though they were providing an X-ray of what makes someone tick. Someone with traditionalist values is more likely to be resistant to change, for instance, while someone who is community minded is more likely to help strengthen neighbourhood cohesiveness and a sense of community.

Civic worked alongside the Social Engine and Catalyst teams to translate the research into engaging and fully realised persona types and has helped to communicate this valuable new framework to staff by developing a guidance booklet and training programme.