The Campaign Company specialises in social research and behaviour change. This is your guide to what we’ve been reading. Here’s what’s coming up this week:
Well. When the TCC Weekly went out last Friday morning, the only finances Jeremy Hunt was worrying about was his personal £17m wealth rather than the UK’s £1 trillion debt; most of the Marsh family had never heard of Suella Braverman let alone think they would be writing a catchy sea shanty marking her departure as Home Secretary, and the Daily Star’s Lizzy Lettuce hadn’t even started thinking about delivering a victory speech over Liz Truss.
But enough of that for now. With environmental protesters recently throwing soup on Van Gogh’s ‘Sunflowers’, this week we grab our palette and stroll down to the Values Lab to ask which of the psychographic tribes get the most exercised about art.
And of course, there’s the collage of memes and trivia that is Charlie’s Attic. This week’s Attic includes polling on national embarrassment.
The Values Lab is based on the Values Modes segmentation tool – created by Cultural Dynamics and used by TCC– which divides the population into ethics-driven Pioneers, aspirational Prospectors, and threat-wary Settlers. Take the test here to see which you are.
Is art sacred?
The decision of Just Stop Oil protesters to throw tomato soup at Van Gogh’s most famous painting last week prompted widespread discussion on social media. Subsequent announcements that the damage was reversible failed to assuage all the anger.
We thought we’d pop into the Values Lab, brushes in hand, to see how the respective values tribes would feel about the importance of art. The responses, painted in the primary colours of our three values segments, are shown below.
The results refer to two key questions. Firstly, opposition to the banning of art. And secondly, the levels of satisfaction derived from participating in arts and crafts.
These questions don’t quite overlay exactly with anger about the throwing of the soup. But they do give us a sense how people see art – and of how angry they are likely to be about it being destroyed. If you love participating in cultural projects and hate to see arts damaged, then odds on you’ll see soup-slinging as a bad thing.
Our responses reveal, maybe unsurprisingly, that Pioneers are the strongest supporters of art and Settlers the least. (It would be interesting to see how the former tribe split on the soup question, given that it was thrown in the name of environmentalism – a cause close to Pioneer hearts).
However, the most interesting element is the role of Prospectors. As the chart shows, this tribe are relaxed about banning art but enthusiastic about participating in it. To reach beyond Pioneers, those seeking to defend art perhaps need to reach out to Prospectors – a segment of the values map who, the findings above suggest, want to create art rather than deify it.
And finally this week, Charlie’s Attic, the formaldehyde sheep at the end of your Friday landscape:
