Do Not Cross The Line

Personality marketing can be pursued to design apt and meaningful content for consumers, but the approach has to be ethical.

- Sandra Matz

Psychological targeting has the potential to take marketing up a gear. Up until now, marketers have been able to target individuals based on their preferences, demographic, and behaviour patterns, but never before have marketers been able to target individuals based on their psychological profile. Psychological targeting enables organisations to interpret basic human drives and match their messaging to people’s personality traits—thus potentially enabling them to increase its effectiveness.

Prior to last year, few people knew—or cared—much about this development at the forefront of the marketing world. However, in Spring 2018, it became a global issue—when a news story surrounding political consultancy Cambridge Analytica broke in London and New York. The consultancy faced allegations that it improperly obtained the data of up to 87 million Facebook users and used that to create ‘psychographic’ profiles about voters. The company worked on Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign. The data was gathered from a third-party app and Cambridge Analytica used it to access data about not only users, but also their Facebook friends. It recently transpired that Facebook is set to pay a record $5 billion dollar fine to settle the privacy concerns this raised.

This controversy has given psychological targeting a bad name but could psychological targeting be a positive step forwards, if companies become more transparent about what they are doing? Behavioural scientist Cass Sunstein believes there are healthy ways we can use personal data gathered from social media— if handled ethically. In my opinion, personality marketing could be one of these ways. Behavioural science can offer organisations the chance to better connect with individuals, and if done ethically this could be positive both for social media users and for organisations.