News Content Psychographics: An Answer To Voter Manipulation And Brand’s Consumer Manipulation? – CMA

The above lead rhetoric takes its roots in a remark by Alexander Nix, the CEO of the Cambridge Analyticathat; “If you know the personality of the people you are targeting, you can nuance your messaging to resonate more effectively with those key audience groups”- According to him, this form of political psychographic methodology contributed to Mr Donald Trump’s political gains during the 2016 US general elections.

Depending on how one looks at it, it is an awakening call to brand communication managers across the globe. In an era of fake news and big data, brand communication executives need to adjust to the fleeting news and the consume-info sway mechanisms attempting to sway consumers from their respective brands through forms of psychographic research and manipulations or the nuance.

In its simplest term, psychographics is the study of personality, attitudes, values, interests, habit, hobbies, lifestyles and opinions of the personality. Psychographics approaches allow for a detail analysis of the consumer or an electorate’s profile in the context of geography- time, space and place and subsequently the prediction of the ‘lifelike portrait’ of the consumer or the voter.

As a brand communication manager; are you in a position of predicting the news-like portrait of journalists and media houses relating to your brand and do you have a consistent profile matrixof such information? Do you have your psychographic media segmentation data pin on the wall? Certainly, many brand communication managers are likely to stretch for an answer.

According to MessanMawugbe (PhD), the Managing Consultant at the

Centre for Media Analysis (CMA), brand communication departments should adopt a new approach other than the traditional news content analysis, but in addition, should embrace the new news content-psychographics method of establishing the personality of the journalists and influencers, the aggregation of the brand’s news sentiments, the allocation of news spaces, reach and time to the brand, the aesthetical attributes of your brand’s news across the spectrum of the traditional and digital media spaces.

News content psychographics will allow brand communication team leads to consistently track, aggregate and analyze every single content related to their brands and subsequently evolve focus oriented messages to ward off any intended brand manipulation. Psychographic news content analysis, provides an effective psychographic media segmentation of the media within a brand’s media environment.

Brand communication managers of political and nonpolitical brands, who fail in their efforts to sustain consistent brand-psychographic media segmentation, are likely to fail in today’s environment of big data.

Messan Mawugbe (PhD)
Managing Consultant
Centre for Media Analysis