Why Personality Matters for Marketers

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Why Personality Matters for Marketers 

“The key traits that we strive to display [through consumerism] are the stable traits that differ most between individuals and that most strongly predict our social abilities and preferences...displaying such traits is the key ‘latent motive’ that marketers strive to comprehend,” TipTap advisor Geoffrey Miller, Spent, p.15.

Ever since the marketing/branding revolution at the middle of the last century, companies have been striving to add value and market share by individuating their brand and attaching it to virtues that appeal to the preferences of their consumers. Such image management is tricky business, as it requires an understanding of not only who their target market is but also how to tap into their preferences. This problem is made even more difficult because marketers often rely on poor sources of information, such as demographics or outdated models of psychology (ex. MBTI personality types) and consumers are notorious for failing to report exactly what it is they want.

Understanding consumers’ personality traits and creating a targeted marketing strategy towards these groups has the potential to revolutionize marketing. The problem is consumer preferences vary widely between people and no psychologist or marketer has been able to successfully take these types of in-depth surveys to an online setting in a user-friendly way. The tools and motivations psychologists use to capture information are simply outdated in the online world. Although the data is accurate, the scales psychologists rely on are incredibly lackluster, understimulating, timely, unnatural, and accordingly need significant monetary investment.

TipTap Lab has created patented technologies which allow us to create rich psychological profiles that are easy to understand and use and are very well suited for online testing. MotiveMetrics makes these profiles available to any brand with an online presence, and because of the abstract nature of this information, it provides more privacy protection than any other approach to personalizing online experiences (no behavior tracking is needed, just abstract trait scores). This information is more efficient, in that it creates a summary of the most powerful kinds of individual differences that drive consumer behavior, and it’s easy to use, since this is the same kind of information our minds already use to help us understand and relate to people offline. Our research has shown that our personality scales have much more predictive power than traditional demographics, and because they are easy to understand, they give a clear assessment of the preferences that drive brand choice and what kinds of messages people are likely to find appealing.

 

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