How come, that industries like retail, hardly make use of personality-centric marketing?
Yeah I think one of the reasons that psychological traits haven’t really been used in customer centric marketing so far, is that they are latent constructs. So there is nothing that we can measure and observe directly. And for companies it is pretty easy to collect data on someone’s demographic variables like age and gender, or just collect data about what they did in the past or what they have purchased in the past or what websites they have visited.
But it is much harder to get actually to something like psychological traits. So yep, my colleagues Michal Kosinski and David Stillwell showed that it is possible to predict personality from data that actually should be available to companies already. But the thing is that you still need to have the models or access to the models and algorithms that turn those data into psychological predictions and that’s something that companies simply don’t have at the moment.
But again here, there are so many new tech companies entering the market and providing these commercial predictions of personality from really any kind of data that you can possibly imagine. So I think that basically companies will get access to these models and as soon as they have that, psychology or psychological traits will become much more important in the context of customer centric marketing.