The Science of Communicating & Marketing Your Business

Anyway, you can find a complete list of this blog's political posts at Politics.

Onto Senator Obama's homepage on Sunday, 24 June 07...

On this day Senator Obama's campaign website homepage was using a K15 communication style (Myers-Briggs equivalents are ENFP, ENFJ and ENTP). This marks a departure from the three previous analyses which were all V15s. What's the difference?

Does such a shift in communication style benefit Senator Obama's efforts?

Well, not really. K15s and V15s make up such a small percentage of the population webwise that reaching out to them is not useful at all and is probably more an indication of the mental processes of the people designing Senator Obama's website than it is a statement of who they're wanting to reach. The chart on the right shows all specific communication/decision styles that are over 5% of the US population. Neither K15 nor V15 are listed. For that matter, they don't show up regardless of how fine a comb you use.

For what it's worth, it is rare that a website is truly designed for some audience segment. It may be designed for some demographic and it is rare that it is actually designed for how that demographic thinks.

But for arguments sake, let's say Senator Obama's site, while being targeted towards K15s on this particular day, was really going for a larger slice of the pie, something that encapsulated K15s yet wasn't so stringent in its requirements? NextStage calculates these communication styles based on a variety of factors. What if we only consider four factors?

Sadly, leaving only the four primary factors still has Senator Obama's website on this day communicating to 0% of population.

With three factors things change a little. You have to ask, "Which three factors are most important?" Do you care about whether they understand the consequences of their actions? Then Senator Obama's website is still pulling in 0% of the vote (so to speak). But what if you care about their outlook on life? Then he's communicating to just under 10% of the population.

At two factors (again depending which two you consider important), the site's best efforts speak to 19.5% of the population, and at one factor (interestingly enough) the number goes down to 17.2%.

I suppose it's heartening to know Americans aren't single issue voters even if they think they are.

What else changes from our previous investigation?

For one thing, there's a slight shift in gender appeal. He's now going after noticeably more male audience (the bottom bars on the image).

The homepage is also stating its messages more forcefully than before, although in much the same proportions as before. I mentioned in previous posts that stating a message is one thing, how well/loud/intensely the messages is stated is another matter entirely.

This image shows the relative strengths of the different Presidential messages. It's obvious that (in most cases) the website is broadcasting those messages a little stronger/louder/more forcefully/with more intensity.

Will this be intuitively obvious to the casual observer? Probably not. First, the proportional strengths of the messages hasn't changed much if any at all.

Compare this chart with the previous one. The intensities of the messages has increased and their proportional intensity is much as it had been a few months earlier. The end result is that people will probably pay more attention (much as any loud noise or bright light, etc., will catch our attention until we determine a) continue paying attention at a cognitive level (you might like what you're reading, etc) or b) dismiss the stimulus as irrelevant) at least for a moment.

(more to follow...)

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