7: Psychological Forensics - CSI of the Mind
The author distinguishes between advertising and marketing: you advertise a product to convince the market they need it, whereas you market a brand to convince the customer they want it. Largely, these are matters of psychology.
Human begins are creatures of habit who, in most situations, carry on routines without alteration. Even when faced with new problems, we apply habitual behaviors in discovering a solution. The human being must be shocked out of their routine in order to effect a change in behavior, and will then seek to return to routine.
As such, the goal of advertising and marketing is to interrupt the routine and seek to get the consumer to change their behavior - to adopt a new product, to try a different brand - which leads to a short-term sale and, with luck, a long-term change in behavior that benefits the seller of the product and brand.
For companies with an existing customer base, there is also the matter of reinforcing the routines of customers, to forefend against a competitor who attempts to convince the customer to make a change.
Into the Mind's Eye
Creating profiles of key executives is becoming a common business practice. By determining the personality and history of behavior, one can discover the patterns and habits of an individual, which will provide a fairly reliable indication of their future choices.
Profiling can be done based on an actual person (a target subject profile), but it might also be done to build a profile of a personality type that would be desirable for a given position (a composite subject profile) as a recruiting tool. Naturally, the former is of greater interest to competitive intelligence.
The profile begins with a biological portrait: a factual account of a person's history (family, education, training, peers, mentors, major milestones, etc.), from which a "remote personality assessment" can be done: a model of the personality as evidenced by their decision-making habits.
The author refers to the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) as the "workhorse of the psychology profession," used as a basis to categorize and classify individuals in four dimensions: introversion/extraversion, sensory/intuition, thinking/feeling, judging/perceiving. (EN: he goes into a lot of detail, but there are better sources.)
Ultimately, the MBTI can be used as a predictive measurement - given that a person is of a given personality type, and has specific tendencies, you can consider what their decision is likely to be. However, it's stressed that the MBTI is about tendencies and preferences - you can find saints and sociopaths in each of the sixteen categories, so it's merely one piece of a larger puzzle.
Special (Psychological) Weapons and (Mental) Tactics
The author recommends engaging professionals to develop and interpret profiles. A layman can offer some basic judgments, and often inaccurate ones, based only on pop-psychology notions and a negligible amount of valid theory, and generally resorts to an oversimplified system of labeling people and presuming them to conform to stereotypes.
The author mentions Marta Weber, whose 2004 article on the way in which government agencies use profiles to model the behavior of foreign governments sparked interest in the corporate world. Weber's take on the current situation is that companies focus overmuch on creating portraits (biographies that disclose history but don't have much predictive value), and which often assume that patterns of behavior will perpetuate - when in reality, a person learns from experience and attempts to avoid repeating mistakes.