How does the new “Your Genes Help You Choose Your Friends” study help you market more effectively?

There is a research study published by the National Academy of Sciences (January 18, 20110), which says that it is your genes (DNA) that help you choose your friends. In effect, your genes seem to want you to befriend people similar to you.

Does this sound like an initial reveal to you? It shouldn’t. But I find it fascinating that the media is making so much of this, like it’s shocking news. Basically, I see it as a scientific stamp of approval for what we’ve all known for so long: “we like people who are like us.”

Here’s how this relates to marketing and sales. Reporting on this new study, US News and World Report journalist Maureen Salamon writes:

“By mapping specific genetic markers within each individual’s social network, the researchers found that people tend to form friendships with those who share two of the six markers tested.

For example, those who carried the so-called DRD2 marker, which is associated with alcoholism, could befriend other DRD2-positive friends, while those without the gene formed alliances with other DRD2-negative peers.

[Lead researcher in the study, James Fowler, professor of medical genetics and political science at the University of California, San Diego,] He said this situation exemplifies homophily, a sociological term meaning ‘love of similar’ and illustrates the adage ‘birds of a feather fly together’.”

In simple terms, what this means for marketing is this: discover the personality traits of your BEST customers. Once you know those traits, you can search for other people who have similar traits. Those are the people you should market to, because they will find your products and services more appealing than people with opposite personality traits.

It might not seem that deep, but when you think about creating a marketing strategy, it gives you a really good starting point. You target your best customers and then their friends. From there, you widen the circle of relationships and market to friends of friends.

This is Social Marketing

When you think about it, this really defines what social media is all about. Build a great pool of prospects by working out from your best customers. In social media marketing, you build towards the friends of your friends. Why? Because your current client has friends with similar likes and dislikes.

But there are quite a few flaws in the traditional social or “tribal marketing” strategy. To begin with, it is a slow and laborious process. You hope your marketing message will go viral, but most of the time it doesn’t. It starts off slow and can take a long time to build up enough volume because relationships are built one at a time.

Another flaw is that once the message is passed from one person to another, the message can become distorted. It’s like playing that childhood game: the Chinese phone. The person at the end of the line received a different message than he had at the beginning.

Finally, this type of marketing strategy doesn’t work for everyone: quite a few people aren’t hooked on the whole Facebook “thing” and don’t want to be either.

But there is a way to make this type of marketing and many other types of marketing more effective.

The underlying flaw of social marketing

The underlying flaw that needs to be fixed is that it tends to focus strictly on “relationships”. While that’s a good thing, you may never have a clear idea of ​​what the similarities are between people, so you can create a profile of your ideal customer and what makes them like each other.

Let me give you an example. I come from a large family, so my “friend list” on Facebook is quite extensive. Just with blood related people, I could easily have 100+ people on my friends list. Add in your typical high school and college friends, and that number really increases to several hundred.

However, I know that most of those people would not be customers of my products. They have very different interests from me, mainly because they have a different personality than me.

Buried in this latest scientific study is documentation of the actual genes that make up a person’s personality. For example, people with the gene known as CYP2A6 have, as one paper on the study of the gene states, an “open personality.” This is another way of saying that they are “extroverted.”

“Extrovert” is one of eight different personality traits that a person might be inclined to have. Those eight different traits can be arranged to give 16 different combinations. If you’re familiar with the well-known “Myers-Briggs Type Indicator,” which is often used by guidance counselors to help people make career choices, this will sound very familiar to you.

I don’t have the extrovert gene turned on in my body. However, many of my family members do (as do 75% of the world’s population).

One of the downsides of not having the extrovert gene is that I don’t find social media marketing all that appealing. For introverts, the concept of posting every thought that crosses your mind on your Facebook wall is very foreign. I find comfort in solitude, where I can process my own thoughts and feelings. It’s hard for my brain to do that and also process the thoughts and feelings of hundreds of other people at the same time.

But the extrovert can accept this stream of consciousness from others. As an introvert, I don’t know what they do with all that, but they feel comfortable when they flow into their personal space. In fact, they feel lonely when they don’t have it.

Social marketing works very well for many companies; because it is based on a common personality trait that 75% of the world shares: being an extrovert. That’s why all the marketing gurus say you MUST do social marketing. It works for them, because they are also extroverts.

But it doesn’t work for “everyone”. Social marketing is very difficult for the 25% of the population who are introverts.

Key Point: Marketing Personality Traits Makes Marketing More Effective

Just like knowing the differences between extrovert and introvert personality traits, the other six traits also play a huge role in a person’s behavior. In particular, the role of how they react to your marketing message and whether or not it will drive them to buy your product.

We have briefly covered two of the most visible personality traits here in this article. And we have shown through scientific study that traits are written into your genes. The next thing to do is dig into your top customer’s personality traits and find out what makes them tick. From this, you can make your marketing more effective because you’ll be pushing all the right buttons on your prospects, the ones they want you to push. The result is that you’ll take a big leap outward in whatever marketing medium you choose.

It all boils down to this: Social media marketing (and any other type of marketing) can be made more effective by engaging your prospects’ personality traits. Combine the right traits and you greatly increase the chances that your marketing message will be heard and responded to.

References:

“Your genes help you choose your friends, says a study” by Maureen Salamon. US News and World Report – HealthDay News. January 17, 2011.