Inside the mind of the IT buyer

There are many, many customer segmentations in the world of marketing. Typically, these involve a chunk of research to determine a set of buyer archetypes. These are often then given names such as 'big man on campus', 'harassed MD' and 'digital refusenik'.

As an approach, they can be pretty helpful. They provide a shorthand way of looking at an audience – one which enables us to form more targeted strategies that speak to the real needs of our key targets.

The problem, however, is that typically they are simply made up.

That's unfair of course. These segments represent portraits of groupings of characteristics as seen by the researchers. We get a group of people that kinda, sorta look like X. But the point I'm making is that exactly what these groupings are is fundamentally down to the subjective view of the researcher.

Myers-Briggs – the ultimate segmentation?

A few years back, I decided to try to do better. I'd been on some leadership training course and taken a test to determine my Myers-Briggs personality. What it told me was both accurate and intriguing.

Many of you will know of Myers-Briggs – it's been around some 50+ years and is based on the work of Carl Jung. Essentially it breaks the world down into 16 personality types (which can be clustered into 4 groups). The individual types are given 4-letter codes. Mine is INTP which means I'm Introverted, iNtuitive, Thinking and Perceiving. I won't go into more detail here as you can find out all that on the hundred's of sites already devoted to the topic.

The key thing for me is that over the years millions of people have taken Myers-Briggs tests (the most widely used is called the MBTI). This means that we have a huge body of evidence about what makes an individual personality type tick. I began wondering whether we could use these types as a kind of über–segmentation system.

Typing IT buyers

We decided that the only way to find out was to try an experiment. At Banner, we created a kind of Myers-Briggs-lite test that could be completed in a few minutes online. We then tested it to see that it broadly delivered the same results as other tests. And then we invited IT professionals in the US, UK, France and Germany to have a go. Everyone who completed the survey got a copy of their results and a little bit of analysis for their effort.

We got just under 1,000 responses. And the results were rather remarkable:

Focusing just on Europe for a moment, out of the 16 types, two alone accounted for 40% of the IT professionals we surveyed. One was my own type, INTP (which we termed Architects) with 22% and the other was ISTP (which we called Craftsmen).

We then compared Europe to the US – astonishingly the top personality type in Europe accounted for just 5% of US IT professionals.

And France and Germany were almost polar opposites.

A presentation of the top-line results is embedded below. You can download it from Slideshare.

Inside the mind of the IT buyer

View more presentations from Jay Ball.

The good and the bad

So is this really the panacea for segmentation? Well, not quite.

Where it appears to work well is in specialised job roles. As soon as it is extended to more general business roles (eg general management) the individual personality spikes vanish and the distribution returns to that of the general population.

There are those who are not convinced by Myers-Briggs as an approach to personality – Google 'Criticisms of Myers-Briggs' for a pretty comprehensive list. There are a whole bunch of other competing systems.

But, as a possible approach it at least removes some of the subjectivity from segmentation. The profiles we built up (by reviewing every piece of literature on the subject) gave us over 60 different personality attributes – from how people make decisions and how they like to be communicated with through to what kind of parents they make and how they react under stress.

See what you think.