Does geography & profession impact personality?
Whenever you’re researching a market by geography, there will likely be a limited set personality traits based on functional characteristics of your Market.
For example, imagine doctors that live in a certain region of the United States. I found that in discrete areas there were three primary traits of doctors in that area. Lets say, this was limited to a 4 State area. The area tends to be a bit on the poor side. There was an absence of core drivers and needs. These people were not willing to build a business and snuff out competition, which could be too close for comfort. If you’re going to have that dominant approach in a small market, you might not have many friends (or customers) left. There’s a bit of a get-along factor that takes place. The larger the town, the more drive.
I discovered a) social orientation, b) family orientation and c) a lot of anxiety. There was clearly a dominant family orientation in certain regions as opposed to others. Likewise, for social and anxiety. To geographically market without recognizing the trait variation would mean incredible inefficiencies being absorbed into the media plan. For example, to build out a family-oriented marketing plan for the state of Iowa would automatically create three times or more inefficiencies through Google AdWords and social platforms.
The product is another aspect. Once you identify the core traits and how these doctors are oriented, in these areas, the product needs to be adaptive to the job to be done. For example the doctor who is very socially oriented, wants to be connected to their customers even if there is no need for their services. This is part of their personality. Any product that would have an integrated or even modular capability to help connect customers outside of immediate need would be a win for these doctors.
There are a lot of doctors in these particular regions that are family-oriented. They went through all this schooling not to get rich (they are not) but to provide for a family in the environment they desire. They live well and focus on their family. Any product that is oriented towards helping them with their family would be seen as a win. Imagine a partnership with care.com or some way to help transport, care for or organized life while at work.
People are diverse in thoughts and needs. Geography plays a part and when the media is geo-centric it creates massive inefficiencies that can be solved by hyper focusing on the needs, 1:1 media, and building products are can be dynamically modified to need psychological needs.