How Liberal and Conservative Customers Think About Good and Evil
How clear you are about the problem you solve will attract more of one group than the other.
“Business is war” is often attributed to Kevin O’Leary, a Canadian businessman and TV personality. He built a family education and entertainment software company by executing hostile takeovers. For him, competitors are evil. He stated, “I want to make their lives miserable. I want to steal their market share. I want them to fear me, and I want everyone on my team thinking we're going to win.”
Indeed, not all businesses have this attitude toward competition. What about how you talk to your customers? Do they see your company and products as good, solving evil problems? How you frame good and evil for your market will resonate more with liberal or conservative customers - and your leadership may set the tone.
The Idea
The primary difference between conservative and liberal customers in perceiving good and evil is clarity. How stark the lines you draw between good and evil will attract or put off one group or the other.
For more liberal customers, good and evil are less obvious. The world is not so black and white. There are fuzzy lines between good and evil that prevent more liberal customers from making this simple classification. If you force this distinction on your more liberal market, you will be met with indifference or disagreement, even if subtle.
For conservative customers, good and evil are more apparent, easily defined, and immediate. Conservative customers are more comfortable with categorizing things into each of the two categories, and it comes easily. For conservative customers, presenting your products as a force of good in the face of adversity can go a long way to pull them in to consider what you are offering.
The Evidence
Pew Research studies how the American public feels about the perception of good and evil. They ask research participants to choose between two statements: “Most things in society can be pretty clearly divided into good and evil” or “Most things in society are too complicated to be divided into good and evil.”
Fifty-nine percent of conservative respondents agreed that society could be divided between good and evil. In comparison, only thirty-eight percent of liberal respondents agreed - a twenty-one-point difference.
The difference in perception becomes more amplified with differences in religious affiliation and religious service attendance, which is significantly higher with conservatives. For example, sixty-four percent of white evangelicals believe that most things in society can be divided into good and evil, while seventy-eight percent of atheists do not. For atheists, the world is quite nuanced.
As with other distinctions in this newsletter, this one is not exclusive. But they are themes you can tap into to align better with one or both markets.
Application
Clarity around good and evil can reveal itself in several ways in business. One is with founders and leadership. In our research into the worldviews of different job functions, founders and CEOs skewed conservative. Conservative leaders will more likely frame up business as competition between good and evil. Kevin O’Leary, noted above, ran to lead Canada’s conservative party, which is just one example.
Another example is Larry Ellison, founder and former CEO of software company Oracle. His conservative predisposition to bring clarity to good and evil was often reflected in his advertising, which routinely compared Oracle to his competition using stark facts about superiority. More liberal business leaders or founders will avoid the tactic, preferring less direct comparison to the competition.
From our research, people working in marketing skew quite liberal (67%), so they also tend to avoid going after the competition in an overt, public manner. Conversely, salespeople will have fewer problems with it because they skew conservative (68%).
Since products generally solve problems, how you frame the solution will align your business more toward one group. For example, when a business invokes simple distinctions between the product as good and the problem as evil, this will appeal more to conservative customers. This also touches on the previous value of Thought Styles, where more liberal customers will take on a broader range of inputs to solve a problem. In contrast, more conservative customers prefer a more incremental, structured process. A more structured thought style will lend itself to creating stronger classifications between good and evil.
You can also pick up clarity around good and evil when you hear war metaphors in everyday business language, which O’Leary employed. For example, you can “attack” your competition, “capture” a larger market share, “reinforce” a message, and “defend” a market position. Indeed, both liberals and conservatives may use this type of language in business - it’s more a matter of degree, with conservatives invoking more strict lines between good and evil.
Is one mode of thought about good and evil better in business? This is another case of needing to step outside of your own beliefs as a conservative or liberal and think more like your market. What’s best can be simply what your market wants in order to buy from you. If you take this stance regarding values, you will discover improved business performance because your business will reflect more of what customers need to see to consider what you have. It’s very different from your business reflecting your values, which may or may not align with who might buy your product the most.
Some will reject this idea because it feels uncomfortable, or the business values may be deeply ingrained and non-negotiable, whether liberal or conservative. In that case, the solution is to more intentionally market to the customer segment that aligns with the existing business values, even if it’s a little smaller. Both liberal and conservative markets are huge, about equal in size, and with equal spending power. You can be successful with either one.
Target is an interesting example of a business that could fix its alignment to be more successful. Target projects quite liberal values, having been founded by the liberal Dalton family and being based in Minneapolis. Yet their retail footprint skews a little conservative. If Target wants to improve business performance, it either needs to adjust the values it projects so it appeals more to both groups or reconfigure its retail footprint over time into more liberal customer areas. IKEA, for example, has a retail footprint that is close to 90% liberal, while Walmart’s retail footprint skews quite conservative. Target is stuck projecting one worldview while selling in a market with another.
When you study your market through a values lens, something interesting happens. You can’t help but know better groups of people that you may have previously thought of as a bit crazy - whoever they are. Values-based marketing doesn’t create polarization - it brings everyone into greater focus to see how bigger markets work and think. It means taking a neutral, more pluralistic strategy to grow your business while gaining interesting insight into humanity, which includes your customers.