Originally published January 3rd, 2018, this article highlights some of the issues in placing “to put the technology cart before the psychology horse.” Its best to have a solid plan vs follow a tech trend.
To make your job much easier, more effective, predictive technologies can aid financial organizations with a way to balance customer equity with customer delight. By having a “win win” approach with your customer, sustainable profits and long term success can be achieved.
What makes a city happy? What makes a city friendly?
I built software designed to look at your CRM and figure out segments of customers and potential customers, why they buy and how to delight them. This technology is based on years of research, machine learning and big data, connecting human activities to lexical based, psychometric traits, the building blocks of personality. I see the world though a lexical interpretation of human activities. What you do in life can be a bridge to deep meaning and psychometric interpretation. With the help of many, here are our findings:
We found two independent list. While these are not my definitions of happy and friendly, I wanted to see how our software would judge the cities.
Think of a city as a CRM. Many segments exist within the city and it’s not fair to say everyone is happy and friendly in these cities. Our technology is just adding to what was already proposed, not defining it. In later documents, I may come up with my own list of happy and friendly cities as I think we have alternative lists.
Dominate Human Activities of these cities are different:
Friendly cities compared to happy cities, all 10 together, are more focused on the arts, home, clothes and donating to social causes. Compared to happiest cities, they are much less interested in political contributions, investing, travel, and outdoor activities. There are few overlapping activities. Only investing and certain ‘signs of privilege’ metrics overlap for segments of the populations.
Boulder, Co — the happiest city in the US per National Geographic.
Human Traits:
Both cities are dominated by psychometric traits of intelligence, systematic thinking, optimism, positivity and self focus.
Summary:
Great differences exist within these cities and comparing one to the other. In reviewing the data, it is my opinion that a friendly city is a lot like a happy city. Great experiences, you can address strangers easily and see smiles on many faces as you walk around. So, if you made one list, psychometrically, you made the other, in my opinion.
These type of list get a lot of criticism and they should. They average far too many people into broad geographic areas. Maybe that is the point of this post: be careful averaging things that don’t fit well. Overall, consume carefully and find the interesting findings within.
New Orleans — on the the friendliest cities in the US.
Some details:
Analytical thinking — a high number reflects formal, logical, and hierarchical thinking. People who use analytical thinking appear to be very intelligent, or systematic. They pay close attention to details. They need facts, like organization and structure. They do not need as much outside stimulation.
They also have very high emotional tone. A high number is associated with a more positive, upbeat style. People tend to be optimistic, cheerful. They show more resilience in everyday situations.
How this applies to your organization:
Imagine applying this type of data to a CRM? It can help you predict and help describe what your organizations means to the world ,why it sells, and maybe why it can’t sell certain things.
We are designed to help you see your CRM in whole new way, psychometric way. We help you figure out why people buy long before they know what they want (predictive analytics). We look deep into what delights people (customer delight as a KPI) about your company. Having a deep understanding of people is a lot like knowing a friend. It significantly impacts conversion rates and retention.
Our technology is based on years of research, machine learning and big data, connecting human activities to lexical based, psychometric traits, the building blocks of personality. We see the world though a lexical based interpretation of human activities. What you do in life can be a bridge to deep meaning and psychometric interpretation about who we are and why we want and desire certain things.
Living in Louisiana, one would think dog lovers are in the big cities. But maybe my bias comes from the fact that New Orleans has an all-dog Mardi Gras parade called the Krewe of Barkus. And possibly it’s because I follow so many dog Instagram accounts based in the Crescent City. Also, I just love dogs.
In our “lab” (pun completely intended), MakeBuzz calculated the index of dog density for the US as 0.152. New Orleans comes in around ? of that and Baton Rouge is 0.125.
Places like Omro, WI and Lamar, MO have high densities of dog ownership, approaching 50% more than cities in Louisiana.
New Orleans scores 0.075 and Baton Rouge, 0.125
What does it mean to have high dog density?
There are strong, practical reasons to own a dog that haven’t changed much in the thousands of years humans and dogs have lived together. Sometimes they are trained for hunting in rural areas. Likewise, people in cities often have dogs as part of their family, for protection, or for support reasons.
Understanding the demographics social reasons to own a dog is one frame of reference. Our technology allows us to look at the psychometrics of owning a dog.
Dog owners have high psychometric indexing for social activities with friends, family and neighbors. They tend to overuse auxiliary verbs, be present focused, use negation and have a high degree of clout within their community. You will find people in these towns positive but assertive and confident. Matches up to what dog owners should be like right?
There are many more characteristics to owning a dog. This is just a brief report on dog density ownership. We were surprised to find the bigger cities having less dogs.
When selling into a dog density city, having high confidence in your product, while using present tense, and negation could make a difference in optimal conversion rates.
This is just a small sample of what we can do. MakeBuzz looks at more than just dog ownership to help you understand your customers. Imagine having a full profile of your best customers, and then getting a lookalike audience. With all of our data and our key to what everything means, you’re sure to win.
Sympathetic people, who care for the well-being of others, correlate to term life insurance buyers. If you market to people who send flowers, you should consider partnering with a term life insurance company. You should also consider why they decide and find creative ways to gain more share of wallet for many other things.
We do psychometric based research on the entire US population. Not surveys, cookie or click-based data. We convert human activities into a lexical based, psychometric view of people and why they decide. Our fears, thinking patterns, social patterns and personalities can be discovered and it starts within our customer files. Combined with technology and big data, we found ways to discover patterns that have never been seen before.
You can see for yourself that some of the below output is obvious and some interesting. It seems obvious that that term life buyers, who are also sympathetic are concerned about work but would you expect their emotional tone to be positive?
People who buy term life and sympathetic people share a common focus on achievement and goals. They make decisions fast. They are not long-term planners. They are optimistic, confident and socially oriented. They enjoy art, emotional stimulation and adventure. See below.
What does this mean for business:
Psychometrics informs us of how we can describe our products to better address customers and future customers. better descriptions, based on who they are, not what they click, results in significant conversion rate changes.
Focus on who matters most. We find too many descriptions of thing like term life, jumbled. We try to say too much. The message gets diluted and conversion suffers.
This dramatically increases conversion becuase you ‘know’ the potential customer without any invasive means to discover what they want.
This is just a small start in what psychometrics can do for business, it has a dramatic impact on conversion and segmentation. Understanding the world beyond reactive data can drive significant marketshare and profit changes for the better. If interested, we are happy to find your connections.
Linguistic Analysis and car and truck ownership indicate traits are diverse by brand, model and location. Traits of people drive the reason to buy but where traits are located varies. For example, farming is a job to be done that influences the brand of vehicle we buy. I can’t use a Kia Soul to help me solve my farming jobs. The diversity of different brands offer customers different solutions to their ‘jobs to be done’.
We looked at common brands only, accessible to many without distribution barriers. Keep in mind, we looked at new and used cars and trucks over a 10 year period.
The above is Honda ownership density by county. The darker counties represent a more likely chance you’re going to see a Honda going down the road then not.
Chevrolet ownership density indicates a somewhat different story.
Buick is yet another density map.
Each brand has associated with it different traits and reasons why people decided on that brand. But what does it mean own different brands? Our research indicates that traits of people differ by brand and model. This particular post does not talk about data at the model level. We may examine one brand and various models in a later post.
Overall, the top 10 brands sold in Iowa that have high trait density (> 1.75 times the US average) for the above brands. If you were trying to sell a Chevrolet in Iowa, You’re messaging should be motion, feeling, leisure and biological oriented.
If you’re trying to sell a Toyota in Iowa you would prioritize different traits as indicated above.
What does it mean to prioritize traits?
It means focusing on different verbal usage, different creative and messaging that helps people realize that this brand solves a particular job to be done. It also means different media types and placements, not based on CPM but based on clear connections to the audience. Social media and optimistic topics can’t hurt when selling a Toyota in Iowa.
There are many different car manufacturers for a reason and likewise there’re many different models for the same reason. People have complex jobs to be done and one make and model does not solve them all. Whether it’s by purpose or by a haphazard strategy, manufacturers have found different needs and people.
Marketers such as Netflix, Amazon and a host of others realize this possibility and apply sophisticated capabilities and algorithms when understanding people.
Using a sophisticated technology, you can see data and people in a different way, based on a foundation of revenue and profit potential.
