Episode 16 - Does Personality Marketing Really Work?

Customer Secrets

"The scientific evidence is consistent and clear: one can increase the effectiveness of marketing messages and other types of persuasive communication by tailoring them to people’s psychological profiles” - Harvard Business Review (May 2, 2018). https://hbr.org/2018/05/what-marketers-should-know-about-personality-based-marketing

We're answering the question in this episode about what proof do we have that psychometric marketing really works. The proof comes from the results of the presidential election in 2016. It was how a company called Cambridge Analytica was able to influence the election by getting fence-sitters to get out and vote for their candidate. What everyone is appalled about is the "how" they were able to get psychographic information on hundreds of millions of voters by scraping the "Likes" of millions of facebook users. However, what gets lost in the discussion is that this type of marketing really and truly works and gets results.

Why Cambridge Analytica was successful is that they understood that personality is more than just behavior. Personality is linked to what person considers important. That is why they went after the "likes" that people made on facebook. When you click the "like" button, you are indicating that the topic is important to you. You don't click that button on the things you don't like, right? The key concept here is that personality is more than just behavior, it is about what you value.

Once they had your personality locked down, the next step that Cambridge Analytical did was to craft 32 different messages that would appeal to each one of the personality types. What they couldn't do was to change what you considered valuable. But they could make the message that aligned with what you already thought was valuable. In other words, the message they created for "you" was something that you would consider important. That specific message to you was meant to get you to do two things - click the like button, and get you to vote for their candidate.

Also in this episode, our new host, Michael Abdo asks Tim Van Milligan how he got his start in using personality as a way of persuading people. Once Tim started down the path, he also describes the roadblocks that prevented him from getting to the final piece of the puzzle in understanding personality.

Additional References:

Here are some additional videos that describe the Cambridge Analytica scandal:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n8Dd5aVXLCc - Alexander Nix explains the process his company used to go after voters "one-at-a-time" by marketing to the personality profiles of the individual.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zb6-xz-geH4 - Christopher Wylie, a data analyst and whistle blower tells how Cambridge Analytica helped Donald Trump win by scraping data from millions of facebook users.

https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/features/like-curly-fries-you-re-clever-like-motorbikes-you-re-not-the-science-of-facebook-likes-8530101.html