IN CLEAR FOCUS: Chris Peterson, author of “Red & Blue Customers” and co-founder of Lifemind.ai, explores how worldviews influence consumer behavior. Chris outlines purchase values that distinguish liberal and conservative customers, how popular brands align with different perspectives, and reveals the secrets of effective ad creative strategies for both groups. Chris also reveals how fear shifts buying patterns and discusses how understanding these dynamics builds stronger brand connections.
Episode Transcript
Adrian Tennant: Coming up in this episode of IN CLEAR FOCUS:
Chris Peterson: Liberals align more with Target, Toyota, Nike, and Honda. Conservatives align more with Home Depot, General Motors, USAA. Why? Why is that? What are the insights there that make it actionable?
Adrian Tennant: You’re listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, fresh perspectives on marketing and advertising produced weekly by Bigeye, a strategy-led full-service creative agency growing brands for clients globally. Hello, I’m your host, Adrian Tennant, Chief Strategy Officer. Thank you for joining us. In today’s politically polarised world, brands face a significant challenge – how to effectively market products and services in a society where consumer values and purchasing behaviors often align with deeply held worldviews. The conventional wisdom suggests that taking a neutral stance is the safest approach, But what if there are opportunities to strengthen brand connections by better understanding these divergent perspectives? Well, our guest today has spent years researching how liberal and conservative worldviews influence consumer behavior. Chris Peterson is a digital marketing pioneer with over 30 years of experience. As the co-founder of Lifemind.ai, an AI-powered marketing platform, He helps businesses leverage customer insights to enhance their marketing performance. Chris is also the author of “Red & Blue Customers: How to Drive Growth in a Polarised World,” which explores how liberal and conservative values influence market behavior and consumer purchasing decisions. To discuss how brands can navigate this complex landscape and leverage these insights for growth, I’m delighted that Chris is joining us today from Milan, Italy. Chris, welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Chris Peterson: Hey, thanks for having me here.
Adrian Tennant: You’ve had a very successful career in marketing and advertising. Could you share a bit about your professional journey and what led you to where you are today?
Chris Peterson: Yeah, sure. So in a nutshell, I founded and sold a couple of digital marketing agencies. And in every case, I was interested in exploring something new, some new type of behavior or new way to conduct marketing. And when I originally started my career in marketing, I started out as a copywriter. And I quickly found out two things. One was it didn’t hold my intention as much as I wanted it to. And related to that, I discovered there were other people who were far better than me at it. So I think those two things are related. And so throughout my career in these digital shops, I found myself gravitating toward research and customer insight. That was what I really became interested in because I thought, you know, it is absolutely the starting point of all great marketing. If you don’t know who your customers are, then you’re just throwing darts. So over the years, as I worked with different shops, my first shop was acquired by Publicis Group, and I ended up working with the network of agencies there. And I always spent time with the account planners and the research people. You know, I really liked it and I became kind of a research geek. Kind of led me to taking on this topic.
Adrian Tennant: Well, it was back in 2020 that I believe you came across a study from the non-partisan Pew Research Center that prompted you to explore the connection between political worldviews and consumer behavior. Can you tell us about that ‘aha’ moment and how it led you to write “Red & Blue Customers”?
Chris Peterson: Yeah, so it really was an aha moment, or at least a pretty big spark to get the project going. The study was super interesting to me because for the first time I saw what Pew did was they allowed people to answer open-ended questions. You know, normally when you read research from Gallup or Pew or other sources, it’s all multiple choice. You see the charts, you get the answers. In this case, it was right after the 2020 election and they asked conservatives and liberals to express what they wanted the other side to know about themselves, okay? So if you’re liberal, it’s like, what do you want conservatives to know about you and vice versa, right? And Pew published something like, I don’t know, it was 100, 150 responses, and I read them all. And what struck me was how authentic and kind of heartfelt they all were on both sides. And these were people who truly believed in what they were saying. And as I read it, what occurred to me was like, wow, these are two different ways of seeing the world. They’re clearly different. So how does this not affect what people buy? And that was the question that came out of it. And I immediately started researching, OK, are there differences? I didn’t know. So I started researching. And it didn’t take long at all to find an enormous amount of evidence that the two groups align with different brands, consume different media, buy different products. And just some quick examples, you know, the Harris poll conducts a study every year about brand alignment between liberals and conservatives, like who they align with. So liberals align more with Target, Toyota, Nike, and Honda. Conservatives align more with Home Depot, General Motors, USAA. No big surprise. Like, why? Like, why is that? Like, what are the insights there that make it actionable? And then even at the time, I was working a lot in television media because my digital shop and been acquired by a firm that did a lot of TV. And I found evidence that the TV shows, How to Get Away with Murder, Modern Family, Doctor Who, Outlander, Game of Thrones, are almost exclusively watched by liberal customers. And SEAL Team, Last Man Standing, New Amsterdam, Chicago Fire, and The Good Doctor are almost exclusively watched by conservative customers. And yet today, it’s going to be hard to find a media planner who looks at this kind of distinction when putting television advertising plans together, right? And yet, if your product skews one way or the other, it could be a hit or a mess. And all of this got me very excited. And so it was the Pew study that led me down the path. And when I found all the evidence, it just hit me in the face. It was like, wow, this is in front of us every day and we don’t look at it.
Adrian Tennant: In the book, you make an essential distinction between politics and worldviews. Could you explain the difference and why it matters for marketers?
Chris Peterson: Yeah, so this is the heart of it, really, which is in researching this and tapping into research from social psychology, social anthropology, and cultural geography, very little in political science, quite honestly. There really isn’t any politics in this, although you would think there would be, right? And the essential insight there is that you start with a customer’s worldview. And a worldview is exactly that. It’s how someone sees the world. It’s the facts that they believe that helps them navigate through life. And liberalism and conservatism are two different distinct worldviews. Now certainly some people are more moderate than others, but the country has effectively, and the world, has effectively sorted itself into the two groups. And so politics is actually an expression of worldview, not the other way around. Politics doesn’t drive worldview. Worldview drives politics. So one of the points I make in the book is that People, based on their worldview to a certain degree, not an exclusive degree, shop for politicians just like they shop for products. And their values are front and center because they are asking themselves, does this person or product express the values that are a fit for my life?
Adrian Tennant: Chris, you’ve identified 27 purchase values in your research. 20 that differentiate liberal and conservative customers and 7 that unite them. Could you share some of the most striking differences you discovered?
Chris Peterson: Yeah, absolutely. So I’ll give you a couple of some interesting ones. And some, you know, have huge implications in terms of strategy and some have smaller implications in terms of day-to-day execution. And I think both are interesting. So one has to do with how each group thinks about the future. And for liberal customers, the present isn’t acceptable. It needs fixing. So there’s a desire to re-engineer and experiment to create a better future. For conservative customers, the present is more acceptable, so there’s less reason to change it. There is a desire to maintain it, and as a result, the future is more known. Now, it sounds very theoretical, but this has enormous implications into who you’re selling to for something that is promising a better future, innovative, disruptive. versus a product that is more tried and true and reliable. Now, these are big trends. I don’t want to say this explains every liberal customer or every conservative customer. These are trends in the markets that you can tap into. So you can always find exceptions to this, okay? But in marketing, we’re looking for, with one of the earliest social psychologists, Emile Durkheim, referred to as the collective consciousness of people. And I think this is tapping into the collective consciousness of markets, you know, in terms of their values and how they see the world. So anyway, that’s the future. Then another one that’s more tactical is self-moderation. So this one you can notice every day. With liberal customers, there’s a desire for self-expression. And for a conservative customer, this is more of a desire for self-control. Now, how many times have you seen advertising or marketing materials where there is somebody jumping for joy out in public, in the streets, waving their hands, two feet in the air, and because they got a new flood insurance policy. And it’s, if you see that, that is a cue that was developed most likely by a liberal marketing team. And I’ve done it, whatever, you know, I did it for decades. And it’s going to naturally appeal to a more liberal customer. Now, without self-awareness about this, it’s really easy to skew things one way or the other. And what you want to do is figure out, is that the audience that I really want, or do I want both? That’s a really interesting day-to-day one that you can just pick up almost anywhere. Another one that has to do with the concepts, there’s really two they’re connected, which is winning and success. And this is detailed separately in the book. So how do liberal customers and conservative customers think about winning? Well, with liberal customers, winning is dependent on interdependence, okay? There’s an interdependence of people that come together to win. With conservative customers, it’s more about personal responsibility. OK, it’s more about how someone does it for themselves. Now, again, these aren’t going to explain everybody. Right. But these are things that can be used and you can pick these up in advertising and marketing. And if you’re working in a more liberal marketing team, there’s a tendency to maybe show interdependence more than self-responsibility. Success is related to that. Success to a more liberal customer has more to do with uniqueness relative to others, some form of celebrity or distinct achievement versus conservative customers, where it’s more hierarchical with signals for achieving rank and superiority. Those are two very different things. And so when you think about your product as making customers more successful, there are two very clear paths to go down in terms of whether you want to appeal to one group or the other, or if you want to appeal to both and you just want to be very careful about how you do it. So those are just a couple of the examples, but there are many more.
Adrian Tennant: Your book identifies different worldview skews across departments within organisations. Marketing tends to skew liberal, while sales skews conservative. How might this impact internal dynamics or messaging decisions?
Chris Peterson: Well, it has a huge effect. For decades, people have been wondering why marketing and sales don’t get along beautifully. Well, here you have it. So the way we discovered this, we actually worked with OpenSecrets.org and we looked at several billion dollars worth of political donation data because they’re an organization that is all about following the money. And we’re using here voting as a proxy for someone being liberal or conservative. And today, the correlation is quite strong. And the interesting thing about when you donate money is that you have to put your job title down, but it’s an open field, which is annoying for researchers because you have to go through and bucket all these different job functions. But we went through it and we mapped out the internal worldview skews across an organization. And yeah, to your point, I think it was 67% of marketing people were more liberal and 68% of salespeople were more conservative. So what does that mean? What do you do with that, beyond explaining why the two groups don’t always get along? First of all, if you don’t have self-awareness of this, if you don’t have self-awareness of your own worldview in what you do, you will inevitably project your worldview onto your work. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s just human nature, right? I did it for decades. I can think of so many instances in my career where people put advertising in front of me or strategies or briefs, and you cannot help but project your own worldview on decisions that you make. But with a small amount of self-awareness, you can actually think about, OK, well, that’s how I see the world. But in fact, the country is split in two. And both markets, conservative and liberal, are great markets. They both have equal spending power. And so you want to make this intentional. You want to put this issue on the table. And you don’t want your personal worldview as a marketer to create a headwind for your advertising. And that’s really what this is about. So it has a big effect. And there’s no right or wrong to askew one way or the other. You just want to be aware of it.
Adrian Tennant: Well, let’s talk about the common ground. Chris, what are some of the seven shared values that unite both liberal and conservative customers, and how can brands leverage these effectively?
Chris Peterson: Yeah, so we started bumping into values that both groups have. So we made a very distinct effort to uncover what they were. So we looked at 40 or 50 articles that were written by organizations, business organizations or schools that were designed to prepare people from outside the United States for what they should expect when they arrive in the United States. And the overlap in themes was amazing. And when we mapped it all out, they’re like, you know, it’s okay, brace yourself for this or brace yourself for that. And so the values that came out of that are effectively shared American values. And if you really wanted to, you could actually map them back to ideas around the American dream and the original migration into the United States and why people came here to begin with, right? But anyway, the seven values, I’ll just rattle them off because I think together they form an interesting set. And some are good for some brands and some aren’t, but I think some of these can be used by everybody as a common denominator. One is independence and self-determination, competition, productivity, ingenuity, directness, underdog, and friendliness and informality. Now, you take friendliness and informality, any brand can use that, I think, and say, you know what, we’re going to be a friendly and informal brand. You know, underdog is such an interesting one because if you’re battling it out with a bigger competitor, it’s a great value to tap into the fact that Americans love to root for the underdog. Directness is another one. And of course, you know, if you travel outside the United States at all, you know, it becomes obvious what people think of Americans with regard to some of these things. Even friendliness and informality. It’s like Americans will walk down the street and say hello to strangers. If you do that in many other countries, they’ll look at you like you’re nuts. And they’ll be worried about you, genuinely worried. So, but all these things, these can be used as common ground in a brief, whether you’re describing your customer or thinking about your brand.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s take a short break. We’ll be right back after this message.
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Adrian Tennant: Welcome back. I’m talking with Chris Peterson, co-founder of Lifemind.ai and the author of “Red & Blue Customers: How to Drive Growth in a Polarized World.” Chris, you mentioned that fear and safety can temporarily shift people’s perspectives. How might marketers consider this dynamic when planning campaigns?
Chris Peterson: Yeah, yeah. So fear and safety is one of the most interesting ones, I think, in the book. And by the way, all these values are profiled in the book with citations to all the research that backs it up. I’m not making this stuff up. And as I said before, it all comes from social psychology, social anthropology, and cultural geography, not political science. If you look into the world of social psychology, you’ll find an amazing number of research studies that make distinctions between liberals and conservatives. And it’s just such amazing content. But fear and safety. So the basic concept is that fear makes liberals more conservative, so fear can unite. Safety makes conservatives more liberal, and safety can unite. So it’s a little, you have to think about it for a few minutes to gauge it, but a great example of this is, in terms of evidence, was right after 9-11, George W. Bush, the Republican President of the United States, his approval rating shot up to 90% because of the fearfulness that people were feeling of that event. And clearly, there were a lot of liberal people who approved of him almost overnight. And so that’s an example. So how do you use that? If your brand projects liberal values, because it’s hard to shift your brand a lot, right? You know this, like you can’t change a brand overnight. If your brand projects liberal values, then you may want to promote safety if that makes sense for your product. So it would make sense for your product if you’re in the insurance business, or if you have home alarm system, or those are some obvious examples. If you project a more conservative brand, then tapping into a little fear, so you take the home alarm system industry, you can see that playing out either way. You can say, protect your home life, protect your family, or otherwise, oh my gosh, there’s people coming to possibly rob you, our system will help you. So that’s a really simple distinction. But that became a really interesting one, I think, to explore.
Adrian Tennant: When it comes to innovation and new products, you identify different adoption patterns between conservative and liberal consumers. How should this influence a product launch strategy?
Chris Peterson: Yeah, so this is an instance where the two markets actually work hand-in-hand in such an interesting way. which is hard to believe given everything in the news today, right? The insight that comes out is it’s actually a little bit parallel to the ideas brought out in the book from the early 2000s, “Crossing the Chasm.” Basically, the idea is that early adopters are the ones who want to experiment with new products. So I brought up all the research that was all about perception of the future and how liberal customers want to fix the present to create a better future. That is ripe territory for launching a new innovative product that is disruptive. Something that’s going to change habits, that’s going to really alter something. And so if you’re launching a product like that, you want to focus on more urban areas, go after the liberal customers. And one of the beauties of this strategy is that both groups are easy to find. It’s basic geographic targeting. It’s nothing complicated about it. And so you want to start with that group. But if you want maximum scale, and if your product is successful, you want to transition to conservative customers. They will adopt a new product, but only after it’s proven, and they see it in their environment, and it feels a little bit more familiar. So it’s not that conservative customers aren’t going to adopt a new product. They will. They just want a little more time to see it work. So it’s almost like, The liberal market acts as a product filter for the conservative market, because liberal customers will experiment with some crappy products and give up on them. And those will never make it to the conservative customers. Now, these are pretty big generalizations, but these are broadly how the two markets work. And the advantage to having a conservative customer is that they have higher lifetime value. They don’t switch brands. They don’t change products. And there’s interesting research that shows they’re happier with products than liberal customers. So ultimately, having conservative customers is huge for a business for financial reasons and stability. But you need the liberal customers to get you there to try the new product first.
Adrian Tennant: So liberal customers might be easier in some cases to acquire initially, but likely to be less loyal over time …
Chris Peterson: That’s right.
Adrian Tennant: … while conservative customers are more demanding. They’re more demanding to win, but they stay longer.
Chris Peterson: That’s right. That’s right. And if you want to put it in kind of advertising financial terms, like your cost per acquisition will be lower. for liberal customers with an innovative product, and it’ll be higher for conservative customers, but the lifetime value will be higher for conservative customers if and when you can get them. But, you know, it would be a huge mistake to start with more conservative customers with a disruptive product. So those kinds of things people can be very aware of. And there’s also instances, I think, of innovative startups being successful early on and then not achieving scale because they haven’t made the transition to a broader market. They see success with a pocket of the market thinking everyone else is like that when they’re not.
Adrian Tennant: For a brand trying to understand where their customers fall on this spectrum, what practical steps would you recommend to determine if their customer base skews liberal or conservative?
Chris Peterson: So this is really the first important step in thinking about this kind of strategy, which is asking yourself, who are my customers on this front? And most brands can’t answer that question, most companies. I didn’t ask the question for decades, honestly, so it’s not like, you know, this is an old idea. But you can look at simple things like, first of all, if your customer database is hosted using software that does a lot of reporting, you might be able to press a button and have it tell you. Now, it may say Democrat, Republican, Independent, and you can roughly divide Independents proportionally between the two groups, or sometimes they skew a little liberal, but it’s pretty close. And you can also look at urbanicity. You know, are my customers tend to be more inner suburban and urban? That’s going to be more liberal versus ex-urban and more rural. It’s the core suburbs where they’re going to be mixed. But those can give you clues as to a skew one way or another. Age is another one. Older customers will be more conservative than younger customers. But, you know, none of this is exclusive, but these are pretty good signals and they’re not hard to get.
Adrian Tennant: Let’s talk about your company, Lifemind.ai Chris, how are you applying these insights about conservative and liberal worldviews to help businesses?
Chris Peterson: Yeah, so one of the interesting things in my professional journey at this point is the book came first and the business came second. And the book inspired the business. And as I was talking to people about the concept of using personal purchase values as a way to understand customers better, starting with liberal and conservative values, You know, it became obvious that there was a way to systematize it. So LifeMind.ai is an AI marketing platform that aligns marketing to the personal purchase values of customers. So it includes the liberal conservative dimension, but it also includes generational and regional values as well. So it uses three sets. And the system segments customers using non-PII data, so nothing sensitive at all. It generates targeting and creative content for each segment. So what’s fascinating about this is when you see the creative content that comes out of this, You read it and, you know, I’ve been a writer for a long time and I read some of this content and I see it’s written for a segment that is clearly not me. And I read it and I go, wow, I never would have written that. And I know why. It’s like, I couldn’t have possibly have written that. So it takes AI as almost like a, in different third party to examine the values, learn the business, see where people live at a zip code level, and then develop an approach to selling the product that creates a stronger fit between the brand and the market. And the creative content’s intended to be given to creative teams and other people as an example, like, look, this is how you want to think about it, and they can run with it, or they can shape it and do whatever they want with it. And the exciting part is that it really takes AI to do this. And as a result, today it takes us a couple days to run full analyses and pretty soon it’ll be like five minutes.
Adrian Tennant: For CPG brands that are distributed across multiple regions, all nationally, can you work with multiple zip codes?
Chris Peterson: Yes, absolutely. Even though we operate at a geographic level, it’s all about identifying the segments of customers who are buying from you the most, because that’s where your market is. And so for a CPG brand, it’s trying to identify where am I getting the most traction based on all the marketing I’ve done today, based on the brand expression, based on how the advertising has been created, how it’s been distributed. So the analysis is the same as looking at a, you know, a regional or even a local business. It becomes really interesting because the companies that look at the results they look at, they’re like, yeah, this makes a lot of sense. And like today we’re working with one company that has customers that are overwhelmingly liberal. They’re not far left, they’re just liberal. And another business at the exact same time where they’re overwhelmingly conservative. And so what you then see is how the segments are totally different. These people are living in different places based on liberal, conservative, region, and generation. And then you see the creative content be distinct, and the targeting, of course, is distinct. And it’s just a completely different way to think about it.
Adrian Tennant: We’ve discussed strategy, copy, and targeting. Another unique aspect you discuss in the book is how visual preferences differ between customer groups. How do design elements like fonts, colors, and imagery resonate differently with conservative versus liberal audiences?
Chris Peterson: There’s a couple ways to think about it. When you think about imagery, there’s really interesting research that shows that people can intuitively identify someone as liberal or conservative in an instant, okay? And it’s extremely accurate. And so that’s been proven pretty well. And it’s based on facial expression. It’s based on reactions and emotions expressed. And so what do you do with that? First of all, in the casting of ads or the visual design, photography, you can actually look for imagery that aligns with the market that you’re going after. And again, there’s no right or wrong answer to which market you go after or if you go after both. And the book points out, like, whatever strategy makes the most sense for growing your business. And also, it depends on Are your values in your own business, the values you project, like, do you have to really stick with those? And if you do, that’s fine. Then you make the strategy intentional along those lines and make it even more successful. But the other way to answer your question is more interesting, which is from a layout perspective, whether it’s in video or more graphic. And this kind of gets into the history of the two groups. But basically, design that appeals more to liberal customers tends to be more abstract. more simple and, you know, the word clean, I like it clean. Whereas with conservative customers, no big surprise, it tends to be a bit more ordered, more hierarchical. So if someone says, oh, I love design with a lot of white space, you’re basically saying I’m probably liberal and I want to market to liberal people. So, you know, and like one of my favorite examples of the distinction, it’s more in architecture, is if you’ve ever been to Washington, D.C. and you’re standing between the East Wing art gallery and the West Wing, and the East Wing is the more modern art and the West Wing is the more traditional and the older art, Just look at the two buildings. That’s all you have to do. You have the columns and the steps going up forever to get into the museum. And then you have I.M. Pei’s East Wing, which is all abstract and smooth surface and lots of, it’s not white space, I guess it’s granite space or something like that. And I have this theory that you can tell which group is more in town that day by the relative crowd sizes in those two museums. But those are themes. You know, these are all things you can be aware of. And the book talks about how to develop different kinds of briefs. So you have a really simple kind of filter for how you approach your marketing. So you can make this, you know, intentional in a very dispassionate way. And that’s the key part of all this is to keep politics out and make it something everyone can talk about openly and learn about.
Adrian Tennant: So Chris, does employing this framework risk reinforcing societal divisions, or have you found that it can actually foster greater understanding between different perspectives?
Chris Peterson: In the middle of all this research, I found that what emerged was the next factor, a collateral benefit, which was when you dive into this topic in a business context, you’re forced to learn a lot more about both sides. So you’re learning more about the other side, as well as learning more about your own side. What that does is it creates a much better perspective, and it actually takes the temperature down. Because the other side, whichever side that is, becomes less mysterious, less crazy, more rational. It starts to make a lot more sense. And I’ve had readers tell me, they’ve said, wow, since studying this stuff, I get it. There’s just two different ways of looking at the world. And they are different ways of looking at the world and they have their own framework. And then what also emerges from this, which I found fascinating, was the fact that, and this is a very personal question, but if you think that your side is so much better than the other, Why is it only half? And that was a question that I hit on, it was very hard for me to get an answer to that. And I would walk around asking people, I said, if it’s so obvious to you that your side is correct, why is it half? Why isn’t it more than half? And most people try to just change the subject. And they didn’t want to deal with that because it means that neither side is really winning unless, obviously, there are moments in time when one wins and one doesn’t. But anyway, I found that fascinating. And the other piece also led me to think about the two sides as being complementary. We talked about how the market is complementary, how one group passes a baton to the other. We talked about the internal worldviews of an organization. You have marketing and salespeople and product people and HR people and executives working together every day. They bring complementary worldviews to the table. So there is a lot of complementarity to the two groups. If you can open yourself up to think that might be possible, given all the news and everything going on. And I found that fascinating.
Adrian Tennant: It’s been a truly insightful conversation. Chris, if our listeners would like to learn more about your work at lifemind.ai, your book, Red and Blue Customers, or connect with you directly, how can they do so?
Chris Peterson: Yeah, so the book is for sale on Amazon and Barnes & Noble. And you can see more about the book at lifemind.ai and learn more about Lifemind there. And if you want to reach out, if you have any questions about this, you know, just use the contact form on the website. I’ll see it and be happy to answer any questions.
Adrian Tennant: And I believe you have a special offer for InClear Focus listeners to analyze their customer base. Could you share details about that?
Chris Peterson: If someone wants to know if your customers are liberal or conservative, it’s a really simple question. We have a very simple automated way to do that. And so if you go to lifemind.ai forward slash clear focus, you’ll see a page where you can upload a simple Excel file, no PII, no sensitive customer information. And we’ll send you a report that tells you whether your customers skew more liberal or conservative as one dimension. In case you can’t get to that answer easily with the software you have or any other signals, we’d be happy to run that for you.
Adrian Tennant: How many rows were allowed in our Excel spreadsheet?
Chris Peterson: Well, see, it’s okay. All we’re asking for is a customer count by zip code. Okay. So the most rows you can have is 41,000, but nobody has 41,000, right? You know, like the last one I looked at had about 25,000, but it’s no big deal. Literally, it’s two columns, zip code, customer count, very simple spreadsheet.
Adrian Tennant: Perfect. Thank you. Chris, thank you very much for being my guest this week on IN CLEAR FOCUS.
Chris Peterson: Well, thank you for having me. I’ve enjoyed the conversation very much.
Adrian Tennant: Thanks again to my guest this week, Chris Peterson, the author of “Red & Blue Customers,” and the co-founder of Lifemind.ai. As always, you’ll find a complete transcript of our conversation with timestamps and links to the resources we discussed on the IN CLEAR FOCUS page at Bigeyeagency.com. Just select Insights from the menu. Thank you for listening to IN CLEAR FOCUS, produced by Bigeye. I’ve been your host, Adrian Tennant. Until next week, goodbye.
TIMESTAMPS
00:00: Introduction to Political Consumerism
00:17: Welcome to IN CLEAR FOCUS
00:40: The Challenge of Marketing in a Polarized World
01:12: Introducing Chris Peterson
02:14: Chris’s Professional Journey
03:47: The “Aha!” Moment: Pew Research Study
06:43: Politics vs. Worldviews: A Key Distinction
08:02: Identifying Purchase Values
12:10: Worldview Skews in Organizations
12:44: Common Ground: Shared Values
16:49: Break and Sponsor Message
18:16: Fear and Safety in Marketing
20:58: Innovation Adoption Patterns
23:11: Customer Loyalty: Liberal vs. Conservative
24:10: Understanding Customer Base
25:38: Lifemind.ai: Applying Insights
27:40: Regional Analysis for CPG Brands
28:45: Visual Preferences in Design
29:04: Design Elements for Different Audiences
31:42: Fostering Understanding Through Insights
34:02: Connecting with Chris Peterson
35:22: Special Offer for IN CLEAR FOCUS Listeners
36:03: Conclusion and Farewell
