An important target market: introverts

Being market researchers, we here at Blackfriars are always looking at specific markets for products and services and how we can reach those markets. I was intrigued therefore come across this article today about Marketing to Introverts. The author, Nedra Weinreich, articulates the problem well:

I have found that introverts and extroverts have a Mars-Venus thing going on. It's hard for an extrovert to get inside the mind of an introvert and understand where they are coming from. This article by Jonathan Rauch explains it better than I ever could (and might help you understand the introverts in your life better). We're just hard-wired differently.

This got me to thinking about whether marketers might need to take a different approach to be more effective in reaching introverts, who make up 25-40% of the general population (but 60% of the gifted population!). That percentage is large enough to think about taking the needs of introverts into account in your marketing, even if you are not trying to specifically reach engineers, writers, researchers, lawyers, programmers, college faculty or Star Trek fans, all of whom are more likely to be introverts.

Nedra has a terrific list of dos and don'ts for appealing to introverts, so I encourage everyone to read the article. I fit into several of the categories noted above, so I felt like many of the points spoke to me. But I think Nedra left her best bit of advice for last:

Most marketers and sales people are extroverts. Don't forget about us introverts and you will be much more successful.

>
As an aside, this is one of the reasons why Blackfriars uses a lot of Web-based surveys: we get a much better balance of introverts and extroverts in a Web survey that we would do in a focus group or telephone survey.

Technorati Tags: Extroverts, Marketing, Research, Introverts, Social marketing