Profiling: Hitting the Turbo Button

Yesterday I wrote about the promise of Passive Profiling—how it can give us better information about a prospect’s position in the sale’s cycle than expecting reliable answers from them with survey questions. After rethinking the issue, I regret presenting the choice between Active and Passive Profiling as a binary, and giving up hope of gaining reliable information from a prospect. After all, the hope of the new web is that it allows a conversation between marketer and customer. In order to motivate prospects to provide honest answers, we are going to have to reimagine the way we ask questions and consider the user’s motivation to answer them.

B&J has done some of this already. Tools like ROI calculators can require information like what alternative solution the company is using, how many employees would use the product, how much they would use it, and more granular inputs depending on the campaign. They require truthful answers in order to be relevant, and those answers can give us an idea of how much a prospect stands to gain and thus how receptive they might be to a pitch. The disadvantage of ROI calculators is that they are not the most imaginative solution. It is the utilitarian solution to the Active Profiling problem.

The best blend of active and passive profiling that I have seen so far is Saab’s “Turbo Gene Test”. Sure Saab is short for “Svenska Aeroplan Aktiebolaget,” but the “Born from Jets” campaign could not have been much worse. The Turbo Gene Test, however, is brilliant. In essence, it is a survey that aims to discover budget/occupation, family size, driving conditions, ecological concerns, and something of your personality, and then suggest a relevant Saab, but it does it in a soft, conversational way.

It begins by immediately massaging your ego, asking what person you have the most in common with: John Lennon? Mother Teresa? Roald Amundsen? Da Vinci? I’ve always said you look “brilliant, curious, and without boundaries” so why not Da Vinci? The marble bust pivots upward and the dull marble cast is soaked in a metallic finish.  Cool, we’re having fun. The second question is the most fiendishly clever. “Select the glove that fits your lifestyle,” it asks. Are you a yellow Washing Glove? The underlying algorithm will probably lean towards the station wagon. Ski Glove? So much for the convertible. Black tie glove? A woman who wants to appear high-society, so there goes the station wagon. Each glove has personality, each is colorfully animated, and each segments the test-takers. With eight gloves representing all walks of life, Saab suggests that it has a car for every customer, molded to you as an individual. Of course that isn’t the case and the whole test is going to pigeonhole you into one of five cars. Yet the test allows for 839,808 permutations. It won’t always pick the right car, but with a series of rules, it can get close, and its goal is not to choose your car for you, it is to motivate you to take a test drive. The tool ushers the user to the car lot, where the dealer can find the perfect car. Smart stuff.

Before I finish with the Turbo Gene Test, I want to quickly touch on question four, a clear attempt to discover your family size.  A typical survey question would be, “How large is your family,” which I hear and think, “that’s private, I’m out of here,” but the here the question is phrased in a soft way: “How many are you at breakfast?”  It gets sneaks past our filters.  To make it even less threatening, it is also nicely animated with toast and high chairs. Imagine if the US census was like this, how much more engaged people would be. Like a good magazine questionnaire, it ends by telling you what you told it “You are a daredevil…”, but then there is the kicker, the car is unveiled and it looks good. It stares down at you—and if it worked, you book a test-drive.  Smart campaign.  Now if only Saab would ditch those awful cgi jet commercials.

So what are our take-aways?

• Users will respond honestly if you give them a reason to, not because you expect them to. They are not that desperate to watch your webinar, especially given the growing ecosystem of content on the web.
• Create experiences, talk to your clients like real people in a new, attractive, soft way and they will talk back.

Update: Refined these thoughts and determined that the answer lies in Interactive Profiling.  Read about it here.