The challenge
BCW had a powerful proposition, Moving People, but needed a way to make it real, distinctive and commercially valuable in a crowded market. The brief was to create a global thought leadership and consultancy platform that would simultaneously build BCW's reputation as an industry leader, give clients genuinely new tools for understanding and engaging their audiences, and drive revenue growth. It needed to work internally, building pride and capability across a global agency network, and externally, establishing BCW as the definitive authority on what moves people and why. A classic internal and external challenge, and the two were completely intertwined.
The insight
In a world of constant change, most communications tools are built on things that shift: knowledge, opinion, attitudes, trends. These are useful but unstable. Values are different. Formed in adolescence and remaining largely stable throughout life, they are what Schwartz called a "persistent truth" — the foundational principles that determine how people engage with the world, make decisions and respond to communication. The opportunity was to build BCW's entire Moving People proposition on this more reliable foundation, giving clients something no competitor had: a values-based approach to audience understanding and engagement that could predict behaviour, cut across geography and generation, and hold up over time.
What I did
As strategic and intellectual lead on the project, I developed the strategic framework that became the Age of Values, taking the original brief from concept through to a fully realised global platform. Working with the team, we grounded the approach in Schwartz's academic framework of 11 universal human values, shaping the research design to test and validate the hypothesis at scale. I built and led the team, managed the research partnership with Savanta, and co-authored the final report. Alongside the project MD, I led stakeholder engagement across BCW's global and UK teams spanning marketing, communications, digital and design, to ensure the launch was fully integrated and commercially focused from day one.
The platform comprised three proprietary products: the BCW Global Values Database (30 million+ data points across 30 markets), the BCW Values Archetypes (seven audience segments cutting across geography, generation and income, described as a world-first for targeting), and BCW V.I., a real-time analytics platform linking values to cultural trends and communications opportunities.
The impact
The Age of Values launched in June 2023 as the inaugural BCW Movatory report, backed by a global integrated campaign spanning earned media, client events, internal mobilisation and digital. Within six weeks of launch the platform had generated $382K in consultancy revenue, with 11 clients receiving bespoke proposals and over 80 clients and prospects actively engaged. A community of 160+ Moving People Consultants was trained across all BCW markets to embed and sell the capability.
The research generated extensive global media coverage including ANSA in Italy, Little Black Book, Communicate Magazine and trade press across the Middle East, Africa and beyond. Launch events included a high-profile virtual panel featuring David Miliband and Sally Susman, and a Cannes WPP Beach breakfast with key clients and partners.
The report remains one of the largest studies of human values ever conducted, and a demonstration that the most powerful communications platforms are built not on what people think, but on what they fundamentally believe.