Daniel Yankelovich: Pioneer of American Public-Opinion Research, Author of Coming to Public Judgment (1924–2017)

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Daniel Yankelovich (1924–2017) was the American public-opinion researcher whose work shaped how corporate communicators, political strategists, and public-affairs practitioners of the second half of the twentieth century understood their audiences. Founder of Yankelovich, Skelly & White in 1958 — the market research firm that ran the annual Yankelovich Monitor of American consumer values and lifestyles for decades — co-founder of Public Agenda with former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance in 1975, principal researcher for the New York Times/CBS News poll through much of the 1970s and 1980s, and author of the 1991 book Coming to Public Judgment that established the distinction between fluid public opinion and settled public judgment, Yankelovich supplied the research infrastructure the corporate PR and public-affairs functions of American business operated on for forty years.

Died: September 22, 2017, San Diego, California. Age 92.

The Fact Block

• Born: December 29, 1924, Boston, Massachusetts.
• Died: September 22, 2017, San Diego, California. Age 92.
• Education: Harvard College, B.A., 1946; graduate study, Harvard and the Sorbonne.
• Firm: Yankelovich, Skelly & White — founded 1958. Later Yankelovich Partners. Ran the annual Yankelovich Monitor of American consumer values and lifestyles for four decades. Acquired by The Futures Company in the 2000s; now part of Kantar.
• Public Agenda: Co-founder, 1975, with former US Secretary of State Cyrus Vance. Nonpartisan public policy research organization based in New York.
• Books: New Rules (1981); Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World (1991); The Magic of Dialogue (1999); Uniting America: Restoring the Vital Center to American Democracy (2005, co-edited with Norton Garfinkle); Wicked Problems, Workable Solutions (2015).
• Honors: Society for Consumer Psychology Distinguished Scientific Achievement Award; Public Agenda Founders Award; American Association for Public Opinion Research Award for Exceptionally Distinguished Achievement; Marketing Research Association Lifetime Achievement Award.

The Firm and the Monitor

Yankelovich opened Yankelovich, Skelly & White in New York in 1958 as a market research firm doing consumer segmentation and product-concept testing for corporate clients. In 1970 he launched the Yankelovich Monitor — an annual nationwide survey of consumer values, attitudes, and lifestyles that tracked how Americans thought about work, family, money, health, community, and consumption across every major demographic slice. The Monitor ran for four decades and became the reference dataset the corporate marketing and PR functions of Fortune 500 companies planned against.

The Monitor established the framework that later commercial services — VALS at SRI International, PRIZM at Claritas, and dozens of subsequent segmentation systems — built on. It also established the value-based segmentation language ("achievers," "societally conscious," "belongers," "outer-directed") that became standard vocabulary inside corporate strategy for a generation. The firm's client roster covered most of the Fortune 200: General Foods, Procter & Gamble, IBM, AT&T, American Express, Ford, and dozens of others.

The New York Times / CBS News Poll

Through the 1970s and much of the 1980s, Yankelovich's firm served as the principal external research partner for the New York Times/CBS News poll — the joint public-opinion polling operation that produced one of the most-cited pieces of American public-opinion research through those decades. The relationship gave Yankelovich the largest ongoing platform for methodology-setting in American political and social polling of his generation.

Public Agenda

In 1975, at a moment of severe institutional crisis in American politics — post-Watergate, mid-Vietnam wind-down, oil-shock recession — Yankelovich and former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance co-founded Public Agenda, a nonpartisan public-policy research organization based in New York. Public Agenda's operating premise was that American public policy suffered from the gap between the elite policy discourse and the values, priorities, and information levels of the general public. Its research method — sustained deliberative-polling projects on education, health care, budget policy, and foreign affairs — pioneered what later scholars called "deliberative democracy" work.

Yankelovich served as Public Agenda's founding chairman and remained active on its board for decades. The organization continues today from New York.

Coming to Public Judgment

Yankelovich published Coming to Public Judgment: Making Democracy Work in a Complex World with Syracuse University Press in 1991. The book made a distinction that has shaped corporate communications and public-affairs strategy for a generation: public opinion is what people say when a pollster asks them a question they have not thought about; public judgment is what people arrive at after they have worked through the costs, trade-offs, and consequences of an issue. The two are different data, they behave differently, and they respond to different communications interventions.

The distinction gave corporate communicators a framework for understanding why sustained public engagement — deliberative forums, town halls, sustained op-ed placement, community meetings — produced different outcomes than mass-media messaging campaigns. It became a foundational reference in the corporate public affairs and issues-management literature through the 1990s and 2000s.

The Career

Yankelovich took his degree at Harvard in 1946, did graduate work at Harvard and the Sorbonne, and worked as a research director at consumer-products firms through the 1950s before founding his firm in 1958. He served on the board of trustees of Brown University, on the visiting committee at the Harvard Kennedy School, and on the board of the Kettering Foundation. He was awarded honorary degrees by half a dozen universities. He held every senior professional honor available to a US public-opinion researcher.

He retired from active firm leadership in the 1990s, sold Yankelovich Partners to The Futures Company (now part of Kantar), and moved to California. He continued writing and lecturing into his late eighties, publishing his last book at age ninety. He died on September 22, 2017, in San Diego at ninety-two.

The Legacy

Every serious corporate values-and-lifestyles segmentation model in commercial use today traces back to the Yankelovich Monitor framework. Every serious public-affairs research operation in American practice runs on the distinction between opinion and judgment Yankelovich formalized in 1991. Public Agenda continues as a nonpartisan public-policy research institution. Yankelovich Partners survives inside Kantar's global market research portfolio.

His five books remain on the reading list of every serious public-affairs, opinion research, and communications strategy graduate program. He is the person who made "values-and-lifestyles" a standard corporate strategy vocabulary. He is the person who made "public judgment" a standard corporate public-affairs vocabulary. Neither existed as terms of art before his work.