Personality Marketing: Is It a Savvy or Shady Strategy for Reaching Customers?

Modern marketing is less pushy than yesteryear's — and I love that. It’s less about forcing your message on people and more about helping. However, personality marketing is one strategy that still dances the line between savvy and shady to many, including yours truly.

As marketers, we work to get inside the heads of our audience and understand what makes them buy. We learn who they are, their age and interests, but personality marketing pushes the envelope into psychometrics or deeper psychological traits.

It also raises the question of when marketing turns manipulative, and it’s not one to be shrugged off. Let’s talk about what personality marketing really is and how to use it effectively and ethically.

Table of Contents

• What is personality-based marketing?
• The Controversy of Personality Marketing
• How to Implement Personality Marketing into Your Strategy Ethically

What is personality-based marketing?

Personality marketing actually goes by many names. Some call it personality-based marketing, others personality-theory marketing, and some even psychometric marketing. But no matter what you decide to call this strategic rose, it’s when a marketer takes into account deeper psychological traits of their ideal customers to reach them more effectively.

I know what you’re thinking: “This just sounds like buyer persona research or segmentation, Ramona. HubSpot loves that stuff.” And yeah, we do and they’re pretty similar.

But personality marketing goes beyond surface demographics like age and gender. It stretches into motivations, fears, values, relationships, and even emotional states.

There are several different personality theories brands can explore here (e.g., Myers-Briggs, DiSC), but one of the most popular is the “Big 5” or OCEAN: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extroversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism.

UK-based market research agency Brandspeak breaks them down for us:

• Openness: Intellect or imagination, curiosity, and creativity
• Conscientiousness: Tendency towards organization/structure
• Extroversion: Energy source in regards to interactions with others
• Agreeable: Orientation to others; how they get along with others
• Neuroticism: Confidence, how comfortable someone is in their own skin

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Whatever factors you end up analyzing, personality marketing aims to unpack the “why” behind the more obvious qualities (what) and buying behaviors (how).

Need help organizing all your audience information? Download our free buyer persona templates.

Benefits of Personality Marketing

So, the goal of the strategy is to understand your buyer better, right? Well, once you do, this can lead to some big benefits. The most direct is more relevant messaging and content.

One of the most high-profile examples of personality marketing is a controversial one from Cambridge Analytica and Facebook, but the CEO of the consulting firm once explained this aspect of personality marketing well.

He said, “It allows us to nuance our messaging. Rather than serving the same advert to 100 million people… [we] can sub-segment people by personality and change the creative to resonate with individuals based on how they see the world.”

You can see this idea in action in the promotion of the Apple Watch.

Apple targets its loyal base of techies who want the latest new gadget in the promo above, but it also appeals to health and fitness enthusiasts who want to track their movement on its website. 

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Not to mention the inherent gamification. 

Each audience has very different motivations for buying so they need very different messaging to take action and Apple took the note.

64% of consumers say they’d quit a brand if their experience wasn’t personalized or relevant, so this is not an outrageous idea.

More personalized and relevant messaging can mean increased connection and trust in your brand, as audiences feel like you “get” them. This creates a better customer experience, and ideally, over time, all of these elements come together to increase conversions and even sales.

The Controversy of Personality Marketing

As with any marketing, personality marketing has to be done strategically to reap the benefits, but more importantly in this case, it needs to steer clear of the dilemmas and controversy that can come with it.

What’s the big drama with personality marketing, you ask? It really comes down to privacy and ethics.

Data Privacy

In an age where data breaches and privacy settings are a normal part of life, critics are concerned with how brands gather the psychological details they use in personality marketing.

Whether it’s through forms on their website, market research, or inferences based on social media, marketers have to be careful about where they are gathering their psychometrics and if they have the legal rights to use.

According to Twilio’s 2024 State of Customer Engagement Report, 60% of consumers say protecting their data is the top way to build their trust. So, it’s clear consumers today are increasingly aware of how their data is being shared and used.

Any misuse of this can be extremely damaging to your brand. Meta, Amazon, and T-Mobile are just some of the corporations that have faced backlash and gotten fined for data breaches and privacy violations.

Ethics

In addition to how they’re getting their data, personality marketers need to be wary of how they’re using that data. This is the big one for me.

You see, I love marketing; it’s what I’ve wanted to do since I was a teenager. But I’ve always struggled with this perception that marketers are manipulative.

To some, we’re out here trying to trick others into buying things, making false promises to steal money. We’re like the stereotypical "sleazy car salesman" or whoever sold Jack those magic beans in “Jack and the Beanstalk.” It’s an ugly image to attach yourself to.

That’s largely why I was happy the industry had turned more inbound by the time I entered the workforce, but now personality marketing adds a different layer of potential misconduct.

Personality marketing encourages brands to cater to their target audiences’ deeper concerns and tendencies. This is great if we use it to create a better experience for consumers and give them what they need — but the fact is not everyone uses this information for good.

Think about it: Leading with a pain point is a common practice in marketing.

We often highlight common problems to get our audience’s attention, then introduce our product as the solution. And there’s nothing wrong with this. If your product actually solves the problem, great — you’re helping someone. I’m here for it.

But when marketers create a threat or fear in people that does not exist simply to sell? That’s fear-mongering — and a hard pass for me.

If you know your audience has a certain concern or psychological sensitivity, triggering that to elicit a purchase is a no-go. This is taking advantage of something a person can’t control to get them to buy something they may not want or need or could even harm them.

Hims & Hers, for instance, found themselves in hot water earlier this year after their Super Bowl ad expressed deep criticism of the American medical system’s treatment of weight loss drugs like Ozempic before presenting its pharmaceuticals as an alternative.

The FDA recently released concerns over unapproved versions of GLP-1 drugs, such as the compounded semaglutides offered by Hims & Hers. So, the fear-based messaging of the ad raised a lot of eyebrows.

A lot of AI tools are guilty of this as well, though to a less dangerous extent, as explained by comedian Alex Falcone:

But I digress. Not only is fear mongering morally unsound, it’s just bad business.

Sure, maybe you’ll get your quick buck now, but long term, that customer will likely realize you tricked them. They won’t buy from you again and they may tell others about what happened. Your long-term reputation will be shot for short-term gain.

Bottom line: It’s better to stay on the right side of personality marketing, but how do you do that exactly?

How to Implement Personality Marketing into Your Strategy Ethically

Again, personality marketing isn’t wrong per se. It’s essentially just deeper audience segmentation and that’s been a staple of successful marketing for generations. So, how can you ensure you keep it that way and don’t cross over into the dark side?

Here are some tips to keep in mind.

1. Make “psychometrics” a part of a larger buyer persona.

Your personality marketing data shouldn’t be all you know about your audience, but a part of your larger buyer persona. A buyer persona is a documented profile of your ideal customer that you create from audience and market research.

It includes essential information like demographics but also behavior, interests, challenges, goals, and other psychological traits. This is where your psychometrics should live.

Seeing them alongside other details gives them more context. It gives you, as a marketer, a more rounded, complete picture of your customer to make decisions off, rather than analyzing them in a silo.

Don’t have buyer personas yet? Use our free “Make My Persona” buyer persona generator to create a documented persona that your entire company can use to market, sell, and serve better.

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2. Be transparent about how you gather and use data.

Where you get your personality, marketing data can definitely be a point of contention so make sure to choose sound research methods. Perhaps that’s a survey, an interview, or social media listening, among other methods.

Whatever it is, be honest and transparent about when it is taking place and how you intend to use the data. This is especially important if someone is explicitly sharing their information with like they would be on a form on your website.

On that note …

3. Abide by privacy laws and regulations

Different countries and regions may have different laws about collecting and using data, like GDPR in the European Union, for example.

When collecting data for your personality marketing or otherwise, do your due diligence to guarantee you are abiding by all laws and regulations.

4. Ask yourself: “Is this helping my audience?”

Ultimately, all marketing, personality-based or not, should be giving your customer what they want and need to feel comfortable buying from you. It’s for them, not you.

So, before you publish or launch anything, ask yourself, “Is this helpful to my audience?”

If it is, it’ll be helpful to you in the long run as well. But if it isn’t and the effort is self-serving or even potentially harmful to your audience, it’s likely not strategically or ethically sound.

With Great Marketing Comes Great Responsibility

When done right, personality marketing helps us understand our audience better and create messaging that actually resonates (instead of shouting into the void).

But if marketers cross the line into manipulation, fear-mongering, or invading privacy, they’re not just risking their reputation — they’re eroding the trust that makes good marketing work in the first place.

Know your audience, respect their boundaries, and always aim to help, not harm. If you can do that, personality marketing can absolutely be a savvy strategy — not a shady one.

Editor's note: This post was originally published in September 2023 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.