Customized Copy — A Study of the Relationship between Personality and the Reception of Linguistically Tailored Advertising

Psychographic targeting is a new way of approaching target groups. For several years now and with the digitalization induced simplification of data collection, it has gained more and more attention. As previous studies have indicated, persuasive communication appears to be more successful if it is targeted to the psychographic data of its recipient (Matz et al., 2017). As main carrier of the persuasive message, language plays an essential role within the context of psychographic targeting. As ad recipients show varying language preferences depending on their personality (Pennebaker et al., 2003), one must capture the target group’s parlance with matching linguistic devices to create effective ad texts. The study at hand examined in what way personality influences the reception of linguistically tailored ads. Six social media advertisements were constructed for a fictious product. Five of them were designed to match the characteristic language use associated with one of the big five personality traits each, namely openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, and neuroticism. The sixth one functioned as neutral control ad. For a sample of 314 participants with varying ages, educational backgrounds and current occupations, ads that were linguistically targeted to the traits openness, extraversion, and agreeableness were indeed evaluated more positively the higher the individual degree of expression of these traits were. This suggests that an ad’s effectiveness can be reinforced by psychographic targeted language, making even small linguistic nuances important in persuasive communication.