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Science of Personality Improves Marketing Results

By analyzing a consumer’s written communications (texts, Tweets, email), the social scientists at MotiveMetrics have developed technology that provides insights about customer buying motivations

MotiveMetrics, a SaaS platform that uses the science of personality to improve marketing results, has released new indexes that reveal key personality traits of buyers across several industries including media and communications, technology and retail.

"Modern psychology research tells us that the way people use words is inextricably linked to their personalities,” says Dan Cudgma, president and co-founder, MotiveMetrics. “It’s a relationship that’s both quantifiable and almost impossible to fake, meaning it can’t be manipulated.”

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The Palo Alto, Calif.-based company recently conducted a survey of more than 125 marketers (31% CMOs), asking how they would characterize the personality of their company’s Twitter following.

The findings demonstrate that most marketers are not able to accurately identify the key personality traits that trigger purchase decisions, Cudgma says.

While 62% of respondents indicated their following was susceptible to discount offers, MotiveMetrics data shows that only 12% respond to discount offers. In fact, 79% of the followers were coupon-averse -- meaning at best they aren’t swayed by a coupon and at worst are turned off by products that are marketed with a coupon.

"We established a representative sample by identifying Fortune 500 companies for each respective industry,” Cudgma tells Marketing Daily. “We then analyzed the Twitter followers associated with each index, which ranged from 10k-50k individuals depending on industry size.

"The survey response data was compared to the analysis of the survey respondents’ Twitter followers, which was used as a proxy for the respondents’ customers. For the “sale prone” comparison, anyone beyond the 60th percentile is sale prone, and anyone under the 40th percentile is sale averse.”

In addition, marketers from the media and communications industry characterized their followers' personality type as passionate, engaged, artistic, creative and design-conscious, whereas the MotiveMetrics industry index found that they are actually finance-savvy, sales-averse, deliberate, humble and indifferent to fashion.

Likewise, retail marketers characterized their following as smart, self-assured, loyal and passionate, whereas the MotiveMetrics industry index shows them to be indifferent to prestige, wanting to make choices that please others, agreeable and submissive.

"By aggregating these trait profiles and comparing them to the traits of a broader population, we used MotiveMetrics to derive the conscious and non-conscious motivations of each industry,” Cudgma says. “Our trait metrics are accurate within +/- 2% and provide the values, personality, desires and consumer habits of each sample measured."

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