Organisational uses A person's 'values group' can affect how they view most issues, from the environment to taxation, immigration or economic and personal aspiration. Individuals with different values are said to perceive these issues differently, and are more amenable to certain changes. Values Modes is therefore used by some organisations to design policies,
behaviour change strategies and
social marketing campaigns. It has been deployed in areas including [public health, recycling and road safety, and has particular usage among local authorities looking to build relations with residents. Values Modes is also said to have business uses, and has also been applied to
corporate governance in the past. A person's values can also affect the language they respond best to. Prospectors, for example, are reportedly more open than Settlers to statistics-led messaging, and there are also often clashes between service providers, who tend to be Pioneers, and service-users, who are often Settlers. The Values Modes tool is therefore also used by some communications departments, to prevent “clashes” and to "tailor initiatives and messages to fit different value groups."
Political uses Analysts who use the Values Modes tool claim that, as class-based voting has "dealigned", it provides a more accurate model of
voting behaviour than segmentation based on race or ethnicity, or social class-based approaches such as
Mosaic and
ACORN. This has affected how analysts who use Values Modes view politics. In the case of the
Labour Party, for example, it has been suggested that the distinction between
Blue and
New Labour is largely a distinction between an appeal to Settler and Prospector values. The tool has also been used in the media to analyse
Barack Obama's victory in the
2012 U.S. presidential election, to explore messaging in the film
An Inconvenient Truth, by
Al Gore, and to inform the debate about the possibility of a UK
Brexit from the EU. This has led some to go further and link people's values to fundamental changes in
the political spectrum – although the three main
UK political parties each have a fairly even mix of the three values groups.
UKIP Some figures on the political left have used the Values Modes tool to try and understand the rise of
UK Independence Party (UKIP) – a political party with a predominantly Settler base (especially among those with Brave New World or Golden Dreamer values), which is built on preoccupations with issues like immigration. Nick Pecorelli argues that Labour lost many of its Settler supporters in office, and attributes the rise of UKIP, in part, to this change, writing that “Labour Settlers, once the bedrock of the party’s support, are gradually being dislodged from their tribal loyalties”. Values Modes were used as part of a
Labour Party strategy on 'Beating UKIP on the Ground', which was incorporated into the Fabian Society paper, "Revolt on the Left". ==Changes to values==