MUMBAI: The business leadership coach Mike Jay on 1 March in a workshop organised by the Ad Club addressed advertising professionals on the importance of values while communicating a message to their TG.

Jay demonstrated how to identify values as buying motives and thereby combine and predict consumers buying behaviour. He stated that values dictated what people pay attention to, what resources they will use to get what they want and how they will buy and when.

Citing International and Indian examples, Jay applied a principle titled ValuSync to principles of advertising and displayed how his methods can be applied to real markets.

Some key points made by Jay were the fact that everyone of us have a desire profile and are multifaceted in our desire profiles. People behave to express their values and values in turn are motives. So, the emphasis was to understand people's values and in turn get a grip on consumer motives.

Analysing the Aquafina poster ad, Jay pointed out that although the ad was trying to look very upmarket and was playing on 'status', the message was confused as it also was offering some free with the product. Another example was Carlton London which is an elite show store which has a tag line called ' An open invitation to style your feet' and just below that was 50 per cent off. Here again, there seems to be conflicting values with one targeting high society and the other degrading that exclusivity.

He stated dimensionalising one's copy in terms of the content and the context was crucial. Motives are like investments and can be instrumented just like a musical score so as to product effect.

He concluded the session by saying just like identifying demographics and psychographics, valuegraphics ( a word coined by him) is essential to track to map buying behaviour. Further, mapping the territory and creating alignment will help enhance one's understanding of consumers and in turn create more impactful advertising.

Mike R Jay is a former athlete and a decorated US Marine.

The 'Master Brands' chosen by the consumers were as follows. A business coach and consultant over 35 years, he founded the global virtual foundation of the Leadership University which focusses on the leadership development system.