A recent article in The Economist caught me unawares. The article, No hiding place, talks about the failure of direct marketing by brands as it, the article said, profiles customers on demographics when what they really should be doing is designing campaigns on “deep psychological profiles of their customers, including their personalities, values and needs.”
The article quotes Dr Eben Haber, and his group of researchers, from IBM’s Almaden Research Centre in San Jose, California.
This statement on solely-demographics-focused direct marketing is indeed a surprise to me as, from my experience, although direct marketing as a practice profiles customers on demographics, it also profiles customers on values, lifestyles, shopping habits, rational, emotional and psychological motivators.
And, even though Dr Haber and his team at IBM “have developed software that takes streams of ‘tweets’ from this social medium [read Twitter] and searches them for words that indicate a tweeter’s personality, values and needs,” studying how people use words to express themselves and their personalities has been important to psychologists long before Twitter or the internet came into being.
The Economist article goes on to say that “The personality-profiling part of the software is based on a study published in 2010 by Tal Yarkoni of the University of Colorado, Boulder. Dr Yarkoni recruited a group of bloggers and correlated the frequencies of certain words and categories of word that they used in their blogs with their personality traits, as established by questionnaire.”
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I have no reason to doubt this. However, studying how words signal behaviour, personality, traits and human temperament is not new. For many years now, psychologists have been working on a proposition called ‘Lexical Hypothesis’ which (a) deals with this specific subject/practice and (b) definitely precedes research done by Dr Yarkoni and Dr Haber.
To quote Helen Fisher from her book ‘Why Him? Why Her?’, “This proposition has a history, known as Lexical Hypothesis. In the 1930s, psychologists proposed that when individuals describe themselves, they choose words and phrases that emphasize traits they regard as central to who they are. With time, these words become encoded in their speaking habits.”
Don’t get me wrong. I am inspired by the work Dr Yarkoni and Dr Haber are doing now, and by the work done by psychologists before them. And, I do believe that (as The Economist article says) “the new software has the potential to serve people as individuals rather than ‘vague demographic blurs’. Whether they will actually wish to be ‘served’ in this way, when the price of such service is having strangers build up intimate psychological profiles of them, remains to be seen.”
[No hiding place | The Economist | Print Edition | Science and Technology | May 25, 2013]
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Image may be NSFW.Clik here to view.
