How Liberal and Conservative Markets Work Together to Fuel Growth

New products need both markets in sequence with distinct strategies.

Liberal and conservative customers align with different brands, buy different products, and consume different media. Yet they combine in powerful ways to fuel maximum business growth.

The two markets are complementary.

If you want the largest market share possible for your new product, you have to appeal to both groups at different stages using distinct marketing strategies. It’s a sequence of strategies, not a choice between one or the other.

When you launch a new innovative product, you want the so-called “early adopters” – those who will take risks to experiment with new things.

But who are they?

Early adopters are largely liberal because liberal customers value experimentation and exploration more than conservative customers. These qualities are defining characteristics of the liberal market.

Experimentation and exploration are all part of the inherent desire among liberal customers to tinker with the present to create a better future. It’s part and parcel of their worldview and new innovative products are a great fit.

Conservative customers, on the other hand, are more satisfied with the present – so there is less need to try new products. Marketing a new innovative product to conservative customers is mostly a waste of time – until the product gains traction.

Crossing the Worldview Chasm

In his seminal book from 1991, Crossing the Chasm, Geoffrey Moore refers to the ‘late majority’ customers - those that adopt innovation later - as ‘the conservatives.’ He was using the term more generally and he probably didn’t realize at the time how much potential insight there was in that label. 1991 was “pre-polarization.”

Consider Moore’s description of the late majority ‘conservatives’:

Conservatives, in essence, are against discontinuous innovation. They believe far more in tradition than progress. And when they find something that works for them, they like to stick with it.

Research in social psychology since the publication of his book proves his points: a team from the Jones Graduate School of Business at Rice University demonstrates that conservative customers are more satisfied with the products they buy when compared to liberal customers. Research from the University of Sydney extends this finding showing that conservative customers complain less than liberal customers.

You can argue that while more liberal customers are discovering something exciting and new, conservative customers don’t waste their time with new products that fail. They wait until there is clear evidence of success – a proven reliable solution.

Liberal customers act as a product filter for conservative customers.

Knowing Early Adopter and Late Majority Worldview Powers Targeting

The reason this distinction between liberal and conservative customers is so important is that it provides the targeting information you need for one group or the other. You can find more liberal early adopters in urban and inner suburban settings while conservative customers are far more likely to live in the outer suburbs, exurbs, and rural areas.

It’s not a perfect model for targeting, but it may be close enough to act as an effective geographic layer on your current targeting. You can become more precise in this targeting using tools like Lifemind.

So it’s not just an academic theory – it’s actionable today. Right now.

You can apply the targeting when you launch an innovative new product and shift the targeting with new messaging when you see diminishing returns. And if the product fails with early adopters, then there’s no point in marketing it to the later majority – the conservative customers.

For example, let’s say you launch an innovative new piece of fitness equipment. In the beginning, you focus on the technology, expert opinion, the new design, and how it represents a breakthrough – and target liberal customers. When that runs its course, you shift to messaging around reliability and proven performance, and invoke familiarity by using customer testimonials – and target conservative customers.

Team Self-Awareness Is Required

It's easy to see how founder and team worldview can get in the way of this kind of strategy. For example, a team working in an innovative startup in San Francisco may bootstrap their way to initial success and traction by networking their way into initial revenue. The feedback is all positive – because it comes from within a predominantly local liberal context. Then, the startup hits a growth wall because it fails to realize that all of its efforts are tuned to a liberal market, which may limit its potential.

The solution is worldview self-awareness and putting liberal and conservative values on the table for evaluation and business opportunity. Crossing the “worldview chasm” requires having a strong sense of how both groups see the world and when to re-frame a new product for maximum scale.

Balancing the Value of Liberal and Conservative Customers

Liberal and conservative customers have strengths and weaknesses for your business at different times, which must be understood. For example, knowing liberal customers like to experiment with new products makes them less loyal than conservative customers. Your customer acquisition costs may be lower initially, but lifetime value will be lower over time. You can measure this yourself.

If you house your customer database with any type of analytics tool, you can readily measure the customer value difference by comparing the value of more urban vs. more exurban or rural customers. The core suburbs will be a mix of the two groups, which requires a more precise measurement at the zip code level.

Likewise, conservative customers most likely have a higher value for your business, but they are harder to get. In other words, your customer acquisition costs may be higher for conservative customers, but once you have them, they will stick with you and spend more.

For these reasons, you might think it’s simply better to have conservative customers. But you have to be willing to pay to get them because they will be less likely to switch to your business and try your new products. And they won’t necessarily buy a new innovative product from you, so the timing and strategy have to be right.

The two markets complement each other in sequence, like a relay race. The gap between the two is the “chasm” that can be crossed using customer and market worldview.