Know your customer. Smart online marketing through unique personality profiling

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1 Know your customer Smart online marketing through unique personality profiling

2 Executive Summary Big data tools for customer segmentation are becoming an essential part of online marketing, yet they give only limited insight into what customers and prospects are doing, where and when. Adding socio-demographic and financial data can enrich the picture, but most businesses still have little idea of who their actual and potential online customers are, or how best to market to them. This paper proposes a completely new approach: combining big data with psychological profiles to accurately determine the personality types of web users in real time. WHY Analytics from VisualDNA delivers actionable insight into who your customers and prospects are and why they behave in the way they do enabling one-to-one marketing at scale and speed. Using a unique approach based on gathering psychographic data through popular online visual quizzes, VisualDNA has built up millions of detailed personality profiles for web users. Our inference technology enables us to accurately assign personality types even to first-time visitors who have not completed a quiz. WHY Analytics enables our clients to enrich their existing customer profiles, precisely tailor digital marketing campaigns and enhance the online customer experience. Drawing on robust psychographic principles, WHY Analytics measures personality traits, attitudes, values and cognitive biases, enabling you to assign personality tags to each online visitor. Tailored offerings for segmentation, display advertising and retargeting lists for search ads mean that whether you are a publisher or a brand, WHY Analytics can quickly provide actionable insight and deliver value. The solution can help you to enhance the buying experience, nurture long-term relationships, drive sales and optimise your advertising and marketing spend. In the physical world, we all use our innate understanding of other people s personalities to adapt our behaviour towards them. Game-changing insight into anonymous web users personalities and emotional preferences makes the same segmentation and tailoring possible online, in real time. WHY Analytics provides this insight into both existing customers and, uniquely, anonymous website visitors to drive true personalisation of digital marketing campaigns. With WHY Analytics, you can market your products and services with extreme precision to known and unknown users, driving up sales by giving customers what they really want.

3 Social intelligence in the online world As social creatures, we instinctively know the value of forging emotional connections with others and trying to understand what motivates them. Every day, we pick up on thousands of verbal and non-verbal signals to work out how our family, friends and business contacts are likely to behave, and then modify our own behaviour accordingly. Using this emotional intelligence, we all consciously and subconsciously categorise the people we meet, and predict their behaviour based on our past experience with people we judge to be similar. In business, our innate ability to understand other people s personalities guides how we act, and salespeople have long understood the power of getting to know their customers and prospects. In the physical world, we can quickly start to build up a profile based on how a prospect is dressed, how they speak and how they respond to our questions. Effective advertising, marketing and selling depend on understanding the specific needs and motivations of each segment of the target audience. Understanding means that you can provide content, messages and offers that are relevant, personalised and meet the buyer s emotional needs. Focus groups and customer surveys help this process in the physical world, but the challenge is different in the online world. Although it is cheap to pull together huge volumes of data on website visitors, it is difficult to generate relevant, actionable information about visitor preferences. 1 When a visitor lands on your website or downloads your app, how do you know who they are or what they want? For display, video and search advertising, how do you know which messages and offers will work when you re facing largely anonymous users? Online retail sales continue to grow at more than 15 percent year-on-year, and the continuing shift from offline to online is great for customer convenience, speed and low cost of sales. 2 On the flipside, it has removed direct engagement with customers, fragmenting potential buyers across a confusing array of devices and channels. Demographics Female years old Children Homeowner Emotive Family Aspirers Style Spenders Family Focused Careful Spenders Music Fanatics Arts and Crafters Career Driven

4 Looking deeper To understand what makes customers and prospects tick, businesses are investing in advanced tools for tracking online activity, and in big data analytics. 3 Companies like booking. com are using big data to support precise segmentation that drives sales showing that it s not just insight that is critical, but rather actionable insight. At a strategic level, and throughout the organisation, enterprises like these are thinking about who their customers are and how they are likely to respond to different approaches. 4,5 Data is used to drive intelligent decision-making, not gathered after the fact to measure campaign effectiveness or to justify gut-feel decisions. Conventional web intelligence certainly provides valuable insight, but it tends to be limited to what customers and prospects are doing, and where and when. Pulling in big data on socio-demographic and financial measures from providers such as Experian enriches the picture to a degree but it provides just a point-in-time snapshot of data that is subject to change. People frequently move house, change their marital status, get promoted or even switch careers, so analysing this kind of data will not uncover any deeper insight into a person s hopes, fears, likes, dislikes and motivations. Thanks to new technologies, all of us are gathering more and more data across more and more channels, and yet actionable insight is not growing at anything like the same rate. 6 To boost the effectiveness and cost-efficiency of advertising and marketing spend, businesses need to understand who their customers and prospects are, and why they behave the way they do. Auto Custom Segments Retail & Food & Drink Available Consu m er Goods Brands Emotive Travel Entertainment De m ographics Finance & Lifestyle

5 The customer behind the click You may feel you know who your existing customers are, but that knowledge is typically superficial, based on their browsing and purchasing history. Understanding why an existing customer buys a particular product or service is beyond the scope of conventional technologies. And for prospects including otherwise anonymous first-time website visitors both the who and the why are mysteries. VisualDNA believes that the key to insight is not simply seeking more data, but rather using the science of psychology to reveal behavioural traits and buying propensity. Taking the same approach we all use to intuit other peoples personalities and adapt our behaviour but faster and on a much larger scale VisualDNA helps business gain a better understanding of how to appeal to customers and prospects. Our technology enables us to distil huge volumes of data into digital profiles that provide unprecedented insight into the likes and interests of web users without intruding on their privacy. Uniquely, our inference model allows us to scale profiles to an enormous set of active web users, so that you can even understand the personalities of otherwise unknown people. Company Consumers

6 Changing the game Data providers can help brands and publishers to infer visitor preferences from the intersection of online activity and demographic data. But without psychometrics, it is extremely difficult to predict a visitor s likely emotive personality traits. Psychometric profiles are used in retail focus groups to help advertisers and marketers understand the motivations of their customers and prospects. These include the so-called Big-5, which measures each individual s propensity for: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness and Emotional Stability. By measuring the responses of test subjects within defined categories, advertisers and marketers can build profiles tailored to support their own segmentation requirements based on personality traits, attitudes, cognitive biases and moral values. Armed with these profiles, they can then create content and offers to appeal to each segment. The goal is to target the most likely purchasers based on their personality profile, improving conversion rates and reducing the cost of customer acquisition. Focus groups have clear limitations. The sample size may be too small to be statistically valid, and often a feeling respondents are either being steered towards the right answers, or are giving the answers that they would like to be true. We may claim to avoid brand X on moral grounds, while privately continuing to buy it. Equally, there is a natural tendency to try to rationalise decisions after the fact, whereas research shows that much of the decision-making process is emotional and reactive, rather than reasoned. Even if we assume that the output from focus groups is valid, applying it to the online world has proven an impossible task to date. Knowing that a person in category X is most likely to buy product Y does not help in the online world, where you can t tell which of your visitors are in category X. Specifically, the online world presents challenges of speed and scale: how can you match profiles fast enough to huge numbers of visits and impressions? In the background, increasing use of personalised content and promotions is driving up expectations among consumers that the companies they deal with now understand them. When those expectations are disappointed for example, if you call me by my first name and refer to our past interactions, but then propose a completely inappropriate product the effect is so jarring that it would probably have been better to avoid personalisation altogether.

7 Asking the right questions WHY Analytics from VisualDNA uniquely combines psychology with big data to provide actionable insight into who your customers are and why they behave the way they do. This enables one-to-one marketing, at the scale and speed required in the online world. WHY Analytics is not just another set of data for your big data portfolio; it provides unique insight, based on proven psychological profiling, into both the expressed and the hidden personality features that impact buying decisions. In simple terms, using WHY Analytics enables businesses to start seeing who a website visitor is from the first second they land on the homepage. Even the way in which VisualDNA captures psychological profiles is unique and ground-breaking. In our patented visual-quiz approach, respondents choose images that best represent their feelings about a variety of topics and lifestyle choices. Applying machine learning techniques to these quiz responses and to anonymised browsing data from our network of publishers, we relate the resulting profiles to behaviour across a wide range of activities, including loan repayment, online purchases and content consumption. And using our advanced inference technology, we can then reliably match up profiled users with a huge set of unprofiled users, creating highly detailed personality profiles on more than 300 million active web users worldwide. By enabling advertisers to better understand consumers online, WHY Analytics also provides benefits to the consumers themselves: more relevant advertising, more pertinent offers, more compelling site content and a better customer experience. What does success mean to you? DEMOGRAPHICS INTERESTED IN BRAND PREFERENCE EMOTIVE ASPIRATION MOTIVATION ATTITUDE LIFESTYLE VDNA PROFILE Higher completion rates than text-based questionnaires Start rate: 70% Completion rate: 85% 5-10 mins to complete questions

8 Actionable insight The ability to infer an anonymous user s personality traits enables tailored marketing, advertising and promotional offers at a speed and a scale that would be simply impossible to achieve offline. The immediacy of the online environment supports real-time categorisation of anonymous visitors, in turn enabling real-time site optimisation based on the likely psychological profile of the visitor. As a simple example, if you know that visitor X is outgoing and adventurous, you can propose white-water rafting rather than a Caribbean cruise. This doesn t just help the business to convert more browsers into buyers, and to improve the effectiveness of marketing spend through more accurate segmentation and targeting it s also better for customers. People like being sold to, so long as the product or service is relevant to their needs and presented at the right time. By linking online behaviour to personality types, WHY Analytics from VisualDNA is helping brands deliver the right messages, at the right time, on the right device. As a result, consumers start to feel an emotional connection to the brand, boosting the likelihood of repeat sales. With WHY Analytics, businesses can gain actionable insight into the personality traits of both repeat and new website visitors. This means who they are and why they do what they do rather than just where they have come from and how much time they ve spent on different parts of the site. When you understand your customers motivations and meet their needs, you naturally create happier customers who spend less time looking for what they want, and more time enjoying what they get. In fact, because our emotive tags also reveal unobserved personality traits, you may even be able to give your customers things they never even knew they wanted. Building on science VisualDNA uses a robust set of internationally recognised models and psychographic principles to measure personality traits, attitudes, cognitive biases and values. We partner with leading psychology research departments at Cambridge University, University College London and the University of Kent, sharing data and models, supporting ongoing studies and sponsoring research positions. What s more, our solutions are simple, straightforward and intuitive. VisualDNA technology integrates seamlessly with a comprehensive range of third-party tools and services for display, video and search advertising, CRM and for A/B and multivariate testing and optimisation, so you can start putting insight into action rapidly. Combining psychology with big data helps bridge the gaps in understanding for multichannel businesses, enabling marketers to see visitors as people and to understand their motivations and desires. Critically, the ability to onboard offline customer database makes it easy to find your in-store customers online. Enriching your existing approaches with our unique psychological insight: Drives more accurate and granular segmentation Enables more targeted and relevant advertising and promotions Ensures more effective advertising and marketing spend.

9 Multi-channel excellence For segmentation, WHY Analytics makes it easy to create and group audiences based on personality, behaviour and propensity to purchase. While respecting online privacy, VisualDNA can match customer addresses to the relevant online psychometric profiles. Businesses can then tap into rich audience segments created by VisualDNA, and/or build their own specific lists for example, most valuable customers. Search For search marketing, WHY Analytics enables marketers to build more granular targeting lists using personality, lifestyle and demographic data combined with behavioural and transactional data. This increased granularity enables more precise bid optimisation and more efficient keyword expansion increasing the likely value of click-throughs while cutting the cost of acquisition and delivering better return on advertising spend. The solution offers actionable insight, making recommendations about which groups justify higher or lower bids. Display For display advertising, WHY Analytics works through major platforms including AppNexus, DoubleClick Bid Manager and MediaMath to provide access to highquality segments based on demographic, brand preference, lifestyle and emotive data. The solution enables you to find new prospective customers by identifying common qualities of active and engaged visitors on your own site, and targeting similar users across the web through display ads. The result? Higher click-throughs on display ads and increased basket value, with the ability to truly personalise onsite offers and content.

10 About VisualDNA VisualDNA brings together psychology and big data to deliver new levels of customer understanding. Our vision is to transform the way people are understood online by providing a new layer of data to the digital ecosystem. Our large team of data scientists works with our psychologists to harness the largest psychographic database in the world, plus 30 years of academic research into human understanding and online behaviour. We provide rapid and in-depth understanding of who an organisation s online customers are and how best to communicate with them. VisualDNA technology is integrated with all major communication platforms from Display, , CRM and Search to onsite personalisation, which means online brands can create optimised campaigns and customer journeys with minimal implementation effort. Our global network reaches more than 300 million consumers, capturing insightful data on their online behaviour. Using powerful modelling techniques, our data scientists have transformed this data into more than 110 million deep profiles that combine demographic information with interests, purchasing intent and other psychographic information drawn from responses to visual quizzes. In the UK, we make 45 million profiles available through 15 major advertising technology platforms, helping businesses access the actionable insights needed to achieve optimal marketing results. For more information, please visit or call Follow us on