Personality, not demographics
Knowing where people live is easy. Knowing what they care about, and what makes them act, is harder.
Communication has changed and the economics have changed with it. Blanket advertising no longer provides viable return for most campaigns. Big data revolutionised how organisations identify and locate their best prospects — and then stopped, because location is not motivation.
Data alone is not enough. The useful output of an audience model is not a list of where people are. It is an account of what they really care about and what drives their behaviour.
Five questions
The established OCEAN scale of personality traits provides a structure for that account. It asks five things about a person, and the answers predict a great deal about how they receive a message.
- Openness — do they enjoy new experiences?
- Conscientiousness — do they prefer plans and order?
- Extraversion — do they like spending time with others?
- Agreeableness — do they put other people's needs before their own?
- Neuroticism — do they tend to worry a lot?
None of these is a demographic. Two people of identical age, income and postcode can sit at opposite ends of all five — and the message that moves one will actively repel the other.
From traits to segments
Used properly, psychographic modelling does not produce more granular demographics. It produces a different axis entirely: segments defined by motivation, which cut across the categories campaigns traditionally organise around.
That is what allows a campaign to identify key influencers within an audience rather than simply the loudest accounts, and to connect with people in ways that move them to act rather than merely reaching them.
The responsibility that comes with it
This capability carries obligations, and they are not optional. Personalisation should run on consented data, with clear opt-out mechanisms and transparent handling. Citizens should be able to see what is held about them and have it deleted.
The organisations that treat that as a constraint will use this badly. The ones that treat it as a design requirement will still be permitted to use it in five years.
