“I say, Holmes, why the furrowed brow?”
“I’m building a personality profile of the kinds of chaps that are likely to need a detective, Watson.”
“Ah, looking for some personality insights, are you Holmes? Mind if I lend a hand?”
Building Profiles
OK, this may not be taken directly from a Conan-Doyle novel. Building a personality profile of our key personas as marketers is not an easy task, so any technological help is always welcome.
What if we already have an ideal customer and want to build out some personas based on what we know about that person?
Let’s say that my MD Paul Tansey is our ideal customer and we want to build a persona around him. How much do we really know about him?
The more we understand his personality the better chance we have of communicating with him, and using his language. And if we understand that, then we can provide the right sort of marketing content that he will engage with and respond to.
Meet Watson. In fact meet the IBM Watson Developer Cloud.
Personality Insight
IBM has built a suite of programs using artificial intelligence techniques that provide language, speech, vision and data analytics.
One of the “Language” services that they provide is Personality Insights. By analysing a person’s writing (a blog or a speech) the system can paint a personality portrait.
The service applies linguistic analytics and personality theory to work it all out. And that gives insight into how and why people think, act, and feel the way they do. And it’s pretty amazing.
It is aimed at businesses that are developing applications that need a deep level of personalisation. But how can this help us understand Paul Tansey?
If you visit the Personality Insights demo page, you can see what the ‘personality’ of the writer of 13,906 words of King James Bible is:
You are helpful, active and explosive. You are cheerful: you are a joyful person and share that joy with the world. You are content: you are generally comfortable with yourself as you are. And you are outgoing: you make friends easily and feel comfortable around other people.
You can also gain an insight into personalities of the Pope, Gandhi and Barack Obama.
But it starts to get really interesting when you realise that you can also add your own text for analysis. So I cut and pasted Paul’s last 3 blogs into the free text field and here is what it came back with:
Anyone who knows Paul might agree that this is a remarkable level of insight, and all from just three of his blogs.
What’s more, we can even go deeper and see more personality traits in a sunburst chart. This is extraordinary stuff.
Now imagine we have a couple of other MD customers that we want to merge into our ideal client persona.
I can track down anything that they write on the web, drop it into the IBM Watson Personality demo (discontinued in 2020) and gain a very deep insight into their personalities too.
Then we can compare across all the insights to see if there are any common personality traits or things that they are all likely to respond to.
Then we can adapt the persona to work for what all these MDs all have in common. Now we have built a really strong persona.
There is some incredible power at our fingertips using this demo, and to access it?
Elementary.
