The World of Glocalities is a unique research based, visual and intuitive web based profiling tool that enables you to deeply understand, ‘click’ and grow with international target audiences. With millions of selection possibilities you can instantly profile and learn about your target audience, based on the rich database consisting of more than 62,000 recently interviewed people in 28 countries across the globe. Whether you are marketer, political strategist, designer, researcher, activist, consultant, teacher or forecaster, the World of Glocalities application provides you with cutting-edge insights to build upon!

Glocalities is a comprehensive international empirical research program. The mission of Glocalities is to help clients explore and understand target audiences around the globe on a deeper level, while taking cultural differences into account. We provide fact-based insights and ingredients for marketing, communications, positioning and policy making purposes. The Glocalities program started in late 2013 with a fieldwork program in 20 countries, based on which we developed our methodologies and tools. From January 2019 until February 2019, Motivaction performed the fourth Glocalities fieldwork among more than 62,000 respondents in 28 countries. This fieldwork consisted of two phases. In the first phase, a minimum of 1,400 respondents from each country completed an online questionnaire about their values and lifestyle. In the second phase, in each country a minimum of 1,000 respondents were contacted again and completed an additional questionnaire focusing on brand use and charitable issues. The combined data obtained from these two questionnaires forms the World of Glocalities database.

Glocalities International is research and consultancy agency based in Amsterdam, The Netherlands. Glocalities International serves a diverse range of clients from the commercial and public sector with knowledge and consultancy in the areas of positioning, policy making, segmenting, communicating and innovating. The foundation of our work is based on in-depth empirical knowledge of target groups, values, cultural differences and trends.

The fourth Glocalities survey was held in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, China, Croatia, Czech Republic, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Italy, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Philippines, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Russia, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, United Kingdom, the United States and Vietnam. The selection of countries covers more than 62% of the world population and 80% of the global economy.

The database is based on the fourth Glocalities wave and includes the following topics: values cards and values segments, social trends, archetypes, demographics, lifestyle aspects, brand usage, media behavior (offline and online), charity issues, political orientation, aspirations, personality traits and persuasion tactics.

The data was collected online and was recorded via the Motivaction XS platform. Two specialized online research panel providers were contracted for the fieldwork. The survey was held in 17 languages, which are spoken by a large proportion of the population. If applicable the survey was held in 2 languages (e.g. in Canada and Belgium). In 2 countries with a diversity of local or regional languages but a large proportion of English speaking people (India and South Africa) we chose to hold the survey in English.

Quotas were set prior to the data collection and the datasets were weighted according to national census data. Each country has an equal weight in the total dataset. The survey samples of 24 out of the 27 countries are representative for the populations of 18 to 70 years, with respect to age, gender, region and education. In Brazil, China, Mexico, Romania, South Africa and Turkey the educational quota for the low and middle education levels were combined, due to the low online presence of lower-educated people in general and in online research panels in these countries. Due to the very low overall internet penetration in India, Indonesia, Philippines and Vietnam (less than 30%) we used a different weighting procedure. We weighted the Indian, Indonesian, Philippine and Vietnamese samples to be representative for the total population of 18 to 70 years old with respect to age, gender and region. The Indian, Indonesian and Vietnamese samples are representative for the online population only for education. Despite the difficulty of online data collection in these countries, we included them in the survey because of the increasing relevance of these very large markets.

The world of Glocalities tool enables you to select any of the variables included in the tool and combine them to define the target group that you want to explore and profile. Once you have defined your target group and started your journey, the tool will calculate and profile your target group using all the variables in the dataset. The output consists of the most differentiating characteristics of the target group when compared to the reference group, based on 12 different topic categories. You can click for a tutorial video demonstrating the use of the World of Glocalities tool from A to Z.

The reference group functions as the base to which your target group is compared. The default option includes everyone in the database who does not belong to your target group. For a deeper analysis the World of Glocalities tool also enables you to specify your own reference group. For example, you can include only males in your sample or people from specific countries.

You can analyze a specific target group within a single country by selecting this specific country in the target group selection box AND in the reference group selection box. When you only select the country in the target group selection box and not in the reference group selection box the target group in the specific country will be compared to people in all 27 countries.

The Glocalities survey incorporated many different types of questions. The Trends were measured using a statement and the respondents could indicate whether they agreed or disagreed on a 5-point scale. Archetypes also used a 5 point Likert scale but instead of a statement, respondents were shown a picture accompanied with 4 keywords that depict each archetype, accompanied by a question about its appeal. Specifically selected pictures were used for the values cards but this time accompanied by one values based keyword. Respondents were asked to select the 12 most appealing ones from 48 options (presented in 4 blocks of 12). For the topics: Lifestyle, Brands, Media, Charity and Politics respondents were asked to select the ones they engaged/watched/used regularly from a list of possible answers (in text). For the persuasion tactics we asked respondents to choose which strategies would be most successful if someone was trying to persuade them and select those from a list of 17 options.

The tool uses different algorithms to select the right respondents. For single and multiple response items (e.g. gender, education, country, voting behavior) the tool selects all available respondents. For Likert scale based questions such as trends and archetypes the selection algorithms base their selection on the respondents for whom the trends or archetypes are the most typical.

Due to cross cultural answering tendencies, respondents from certain countries are much more likely to agree with statements regardless of context, than respondents from other countries. Showing absolute percentages in cross cultural research can therefore lead to drawing erroneous conclusions. We correct for these culturally-specific answering patterns by using so called Z-scores, which is recommended by academics in the field of intercultural values research. The same phenomenon is visible among people from specific socio demographic backgrounds which is also resolved using Z-score standardization. What is a Z-score? Standardized scores or Z-scores are statistical scores that enable you to compare two scores that are from different normal distributions (e.g. two different countries or two different target groups). The standardized scores show the relative importance of a value compared to all the values within a country or within a specific target group, based on the unique individual answering tendency of the respondent. As we want to present the most differentiating characteristics of a target group when compared to the reference group in the tool, we rank the outcomes based on the differences between the Z-scores of the target group and the reference group. What is an index score? An index score is obtained by dividing the target group’s score with the reference group’s score. Index scores are used to reveal the most typical differences between groups. In the data screens, next to the index scores, we also show the absolute percentages.

The World of Glocalities profiling tool is designed to only show statistically significant differences between two groups. Furthermore, for each variable the tool checks whether it is held by at least a sizeable proportion of the target group before including it in the results. If there are too few respondents in the target group at hand, the analysis will not be made and the user is requested to enlarge the target group by removing one or more selection criteria.

We recommend to the user to always check the validity of the outcomes by looking at other outcome chapters from the same journey and apply cross-validation to avoid ‘jumping to conclusions’. Oftentimes you will see that a first finding with respect to, for example, brand users being overrepresented in a specific values segment is confirmed by specific combinations of values cards, preferences for charitable issues, hobbies, types of visited websites, etcetera. When findings based on different variables point in the same direction, the user has obtained a solid insight to build upon. We explicitly advise against building strategies based on the outcome of a single variable. Instead, we recommend to the user to always apply cross-validation with other variables before drawing conclusions.

The tool is designed to only show significant differences between the target group and the reference group. It is possible that there are no significant differences between the two groups based on that particular variable; in that case, no results are shown.

Certain variables (brands, values cards & charities) were part of the second phase of the Glocalities fieldwork. Phase two includes fewer respondents, because not every respondent who completed phase one participated in phase two. Therefore, those variables will show a smaller target and reference group size than the case would be if the user had used variables from the first phase of the fieldwork.

As a demo user you have access to the homepage, and you can make 12 journeys to get a taste of what the World of Glocalities offers. Unlike a premium account where you can select everything you want as your target audience, as a demo user you can only choose out of 12 preset items (1 from each different topic in the database). You do have access to all the output/results screens excluding (PowerPoint) export options and the data tables.

What you can access as a premium user depends on the module you have chosen. For example, you can have a license for a specific country, a number of countries or for all 27 countries. If you want more information on the licensing possibilities, please get in touch with Glocalities via Upgrade.

You can click here to get in touch with Glocalities.

You can click here to get in touch with Glocalities.