MADE

The modern expectation that companies should have personalities seems like an anomaly. If you take a long-term view though–say 100 years– it doesn’t seem as odd. In the days before sprawling metropolises and giant corporations, a business’ reputation was much more accessible to the public because of physical proximity. Towns and villages are smaller than cities, so in those places it’s much easier to know what the people inside a business are up to and to hear about it from other people.
We lost that for the better part of eight decades or so. It’s not because people stopped caring about reputation. We’ll always care about that because it’s built right into our nature. It really had more to do with scale. Towns became cities. All of a sudden, people consumed products from companies they had little physical or psychological proximity to. And psychological distance permits a seducer to manipulate a subject more easily by allowing it to intentionally create a narrative around itself that may not be entirely consistent with reality. But physical distance between a company and a consumer alone doesn’t necessarily lead to a psychological disconnect, as long as there is some form of communication that lets consumers know what the company is up to. During much of the 20th Century, mass advertising filled the psychological chasm between company and consumer. But the relationship was very lopsided. That made it nearly impossible to assess the character of the people inside of a company. Companies like Enron and MCI showed the dark side of that imbalance.

Human Nature and Mass Advertising

One of the reasons mass advertising loses effectiveness in a world where strangers can easily talk to one another is that it’s been largely founded on what evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller calls the Fundamental Consumerist Delusion[see Spent: Sex, Evolution and Consumer Behavior] . It’s the notion that people purchase branded products because they want to identify with aspirational traits like wealth, status or taste. The reason you buy an S Type Jaguar or Phillipe Patek watch, according to this theory, is because you want to flaunt your wealth. And there is some truth to that. But it’s not the full story.

The problem with this view of marketing is that it’s too vague. It treats abstract qualities like wealth or status as one dimensional things. The other problem is that it’s based on a somewhat flawed view of human nature. It doesn’t take into consideration the multi-faceted approach we take to assessing other people’s qualities. For example, any normal human adult knows that wealth isn’t all morally equal. Wealth takes on different connotations depending on who owns it and how they acquired it. We react differently to someone who’s inherited their wealth as opposed to someone who’s earned it through hard work. And even meritocratic wealth isn’t all the same. A rich brain surgeon isn’t the same as a rich drug dealer and we rightfully react differently to each.

We naturally make different judgments about the intelligence, morality and personality of people based on the circumstances of their wealth. The common assumption that women are magnetically attracted to men with money isn’t entirely accurate (as most women will admit, it’s a bit more complex than that). Nor do most of us want to run organized crime rings because we know there are social (as well as legal) repercussions that come with it.

The gradually emerging zeitgeist around marketing is that companies should pour out their hearts and souls. They should interact with consumers and create content that genuinely reflects their true character. It’s an idea that’s begun to calcify ever since the social web really began to take off several years ago. Still, there’s an element of fadishness to the whole notion that makes many older people shudder. Part of that stems from the transient nature of the Web 2.0 economy. Companies sprout up and rocket to fame, then flame out like dying stars in the relative blink of an eye. Look at MySpace. Lots of brick and mortar companies fail too, though generally not as spectacularly because the physical world poses challenges to scaling that preclude most “old-style” companies from achieving record growth in record time.

Gradualness and Personality

But there are compelling reasons to believe that personal branding based marketing isn’t a fad. One of its pillars is gradualness itself; it can be powerful. The venture capitalist and essayist Paul Graham asked in one of his essays how it is that people with hideous combovers can ever come to think that they look normal. I myself have always wondered why it is that these people don’t just shave their heads or buy wigs. Graham makes the observation that odd things become less odd incrementally, until they become normal. A healthy head of hair transforms unbeknownst to its owner into a monstrous combover over decades the same way a fat person gets fat incrementally. Even evil ideas like slavery can turn into orthodoxy by simply surviving. But wonderful moral victories have also been achieved by that process working in reverse.

Gradualness can be extremely powerful. But for any idea to survive indefinitely, it has to have roots in human nature. You think Scientology is going to be big in 100 years? Probably not. It isn’t organic enough. But Christianity, Judaism, and Islam will be around for a very long time to come because they all realistically addresses fundamental conundrums about human nature and the human condition.

It’s likely that personal branding in business is here to stay and will become ever-more important. One of the main reasons is simply because it can, the same way a river finds its way downhill(instead of uphill) because it can. In other words, deconstructing other’s personalities is the default. It’s just what we do naturally. And the Internet is excellent at allowing strangers to provide windows into their souls. Before the Web came along, it was harder to do that. Technology now allows us to address the most important immediate question there is to ask about another person or group: what’s your personality like? (in the sense of character, intelligence, moral virtue, patterns of intentionality, etc).

As Geoffrey Miller notes in Spent, there are a few basic questions we all try to get answers to whenever we meet a new person: How intelligent is this person? Is this person nice or nasty? Is he extroverted or shy? Is this person flaky or reliable? Is she stable or crazy? Not surprisingly, we hold similar questions in our heads when deciding whether to buy something from a company. Do they have reliable service? Do they have smart customer service people who can answer my questions? And we quickly form opinions about groups of people based on the interactions we’ve had with members of those groups. “Never trust a Nigerian. They’re all scam artists.” Or, “You can’t trust a woman to run a company. They can’t make up their damned minds.”

The personality questions above are universal across all cultures and times because there are and will always be consequences and powerful survival advantages to knowing who you’re dealing with. They’re based on the central six dimensions of variation that predict human behavior and distinguish individual human minds. We call them the Central Six and they were developed through a century of research in human psychology. They’re largely genetically heritable, stable across the life span, universal across cultures and even other species, predictive of behavior across various settings(school, work, romance, family life) and are measurable. If you know how somebody scores on the Central Six, you can infer a great deal about their abilities, character and morality. Consequently, you’ll know how to/or whether you should interact with them.

The Central Six are general intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability and extraversion(remember them with the acronym GOCASE). When it comes to general intelligence and conscientiousness, people prefer other people who score higher than average. Preference levels for the other traits tend to be more dependent on where an individual scores himself.

General Intelligence

Many people will tell you that there’s no such thing as measurable and meaningful thing called general intelligence. It isn’t true. And the interesting thing about it is that most ordinary people recognize differences in intelligence between people, but really bright people who work in sociology departments at places like Columbia and Harvard deny that meaningful intelligence differences exist between individuals. These differences exist even in other species like dogs, where certain breeds are brighter than others. Poodles, Border Collies and Australian Sheepdogs are noticeably smarter than Pugs, Bulldogs and Shih Tzus. General intelligence is better known as IQ. Higher general intelligence strongly predicts success in just about every area of life: romance, work, school, social status, parenting, etc. Higher average levels of it are found at places like MIT and Google. Lower average levels of it are found in prisons and halfway houses. It predicts how likely you are to not go to jail, do drugs, get killed, etc (though some other personality traits correlate too). It’s predictive power is very high and its distribution across individuals very unequal. It’s also one of the most sexually and socially attractive traits across cultures, races and ethnic groups.

Openness

This refers to openness to experience. People who score high on openness are curious, broad-minded and interested in culture and ideas. These people prefer spontaneity over predictability and are socially tolerant and usually politically liberal. People who score low on openness tend to be politically conservative. Higher average levels of openness are found amongst people who watch the Daily Show. Lower average levels of it are found amongst people who attend tea party rallies and watch Glenn Beck.

Conscientiousness

This is self-control, reliability, dependability, willpower, and the ability to delay gratification. I’ve argued that it’s even more predictive of success(especially financial success) in life than IQ because being smart but non-persistent will get you fewer just rewards than being a little less smart, but persistent. People with high conscientiousness levels seek perfection, reliable social networks, resist temptation, are ambitious and look down on people with bad or slovenly habits. Like general intelligence, it’s a sexually and socially attractive trait. If you’re smart and conscientious, you automatically occupy a perch in the coveted upper crust of human phenotypes. It follows that you’ll likely be in good physical shape and be able to discuss a bit of everything intelligently. Higher average levels of conscientiousness are found at entrepreneur meet-ups. Lower average levels of conscientiousness are found amongst obese people and drug addicts.

Agreeableness

Agreeableness is kindness, warmth, empathy, benevolence and trust. Agreeable people tend to adapt to other’s needs and think a lot about being “good”. Psychopaths and suicide bombers score low on agreeableness. Agreeable people tend to make good long term sexual partners, friends and coworkers. Low average levels of agreeableness are found amongst MS13 gang members and serial killers. Higher average levels of it are found amongst people who volunteer for Habitat for Humanity.

Stability

Stability is level-headedness, emotional stability and stress-resistance. Stable people are usually calm, unfazed and quick to recover from setbacks. They don’t get easily depressed, anxious, mull over things, anger quickly or cry easily. High stability is strongly correlated with good mental health. Higher average levels of stability are found amongst men all over the world. Lower average levels of stability are found amongst women all over the world(research actually proves this controversial point, in case common sense hasn’t already convinced you and/or political correctness has convinced you otherwise).

Extraversion

After general intelligence, this trait is one of the easiest to assess in another person. Extroverts are gregarious, talkative, active and generally need to be around others to thrive. Low exraversion and low stability lead to what’s commonly known as shyness. People with low extraversion tend to prefer working alone, are usually more physically passive and usually have fewer friends and sexual partners. Low average levels of extraversion are found amongst computer programmers and novelists. Higher average levels of extraversions can be found amongst groups of loud, annoying people…and, of course, serious minded people like Fortune 500 CEOs.

You can do a pretty accurate self-assessment of where you rank on five of the Central Six (excluding general intelligence) by taking a 1 minute test called the BFI-10. People’s scores on this 10 question test correlate very highly (about .82) with their scores on much longer personality tests. Try it out. After each statement below, write a number from 1-5 where:

1= disagree strongly

2= disagree a little

3= neither agree nor disagree

4= agree a little

5= agree strongly

I see myself as someone who

1. has an active imagination

2. has few artistic interests

3. does a thorough job

4. tends to be lazy

5. is generally trusting

6. tends to find fault with others

7. is relaxed, handles stress well

8. gets nervous easily

9. is outgoing, sociable

10. is reserved

Here’s how to score yourself. Statements 1 and 2 concern openness, 3 and 4 concern conscientiousness, 5 and 6 concern agreeableness, 7 and 8 concern stability and 9 and 10 concern extraversion. Scores range from -4 (low on the trait) to +4 (high on the trait), with 0 being average. For each successive pair of statements, subtract the number you wrote for the even-numbered statement from the number you wrote for the odd-numbered statement. That’s your score. For example, if you wrote a 4 for statement 1 and a 1 for statement 2, you would subtract the number from the even-numbered statement (1) from the number for the odd-numbered statement (4), which would give you 3. That means you’d score high for openness, given that the average is 0.

I speculate that you could administer such a test to every key player at a company, average out the scores on each trait, and that would give you a pretty good indication of how the company interacts with its customers and the public. Of course, you can’t just go around giving strangers personality tests to decide whether to interact with them. So what do you do? It’s easy. All you have to do is talk to them. When you talk to people, they usually talk back. And there’s a wealth of information you can gather about a person’s personality by talking to them for just 10 minutes That’s why face-to-face meetings will never go out of style, even in the digital age.

Because personality and intelligence are largely genetically heritable, they are nearly impossible to fake for long. Eventually you’ll get called out. Even a 1 page essay, blog post or Facebook page provides enough information to assess someone’s personality relatively accurately. The quality of the ideas that come across in the writing reflects their general intelligence level. Carefully crafted and crisp (as opposed to sloppy) writing signal conscientiousness and even agreeableness. If you write clearly, you care about what the reader is going to think and feel and probably spent time editing and re-editing. That’s why most people get annoyed by poorly written emails. It isn’t that the writing is annoying to read. It’s that the writer subordinates the reader by not putting the time and effort to write coherently. Exclamation marks everywhere could advertise an emotional and possibly moody personality(am I the only one who notices how much more liberal women are than men with punctuation?).

Human beings everywhere instinctively look for signs of personality in other people, groups and even pets. Not knowing who or what you’re dealing with has always carried the risk of humiliation, getting swindled, raped or killed. Think of those Nigerian scam artist emails you get in your inbox every once in a while. Does the poor quality of the writing give you confidence in the intentions of the person behind it? Not if you’re smart. Content can communicate a great deal about intentions and personality. And personality strongly predicts how someone is going to deal with you now and in the future.

I’m a big fan of the software company 37signals because of the things founders Jason Fried and David Hansson write in their blog. I agree with them on a lot and I admire their courage to go against the grain. If I need group collaboration software, I’ll go straight to Basecamp because I personally like these guys. That’s the power of personality-based marketing.

Content

Most companies still don’t understand what the big deal is with content and personal branding. The interesting thing is that not cultivating a personal brand is actually the historical anomaly. Remember when I mentioned earlier that the default is to be curious about personality? Well, human nature hasn’t changed in the last 100 years. We’ve always wanted access to the souls of the people we conduct economic transactions with because the stakes can be high.

The world of personal branding follows a simple algorithm: If a communication channel exists, then talk. Creating content(in the form of unique and interesting text, audio, video, graphics, etc) won’t necessarily bring you outsized returns of any kind. But not doing so may yield outsized diminishing returns in the long run. Like on a spinning treadmill, the negative consequences of not running (bruises, fractured bones) are greater than the positive rewards you reap from moving your legs.

If you’re a huge company that’s managed to muscle your competition out of the market, then your name alone may be enough to keep you safe. But most of the business world isn’t made up of big corporations that operate on the principle of internecine warfare. Instead, much of it resembles an open air market where there’s room for lots of people selling the same thing. But the guy with the best reputation gets more customers because people like him.