When considering investing in a private, online customer community as a source for insights and co-innovation, skeptical prospects will often ask in reference to the community members we recruit, “Who are these people?”
What they’re politely expressing is the concern that the only people who would spend time online almost every week sharing their experiences, ideas, and opinions are “outliers,” be they lonely introverts, rabid axe-grinders, or mercenary professional survey takers. And the reassurance that they’re generally seeking is that we at Communispace can assemble a community of “normal” customers, people who are generally representative of the market they’re trying to reach.
While we empirically know from nine years of experience recruiting and running over 300 communities that our members are indeed real and “ordinary” people, we decided to systematically gather psychographic data to complement and round out the demographic data we routinely collect. To that end, we administered a short form of the Myers-Briggs Type Inventory (MBTI) to 3,223 members of 23 disparate Communispace communities, ranging from those comprising affluent, highly educated investors to those comprising time-starved, middle-income moms.
Developed by psychologist Carl Jung and refined by Katharine Cook Briggs and Isabel Briggs Myers, the MBTI is based on the theory that individuals are either born with, or develop, certain personality types, that is, preferred ways of thinking and acting. With volumes of research supporting its validity, the MBTI is used for everything from executive coaching to marriage counseling.
What we found confirmed our gut sense, which is that our members across communities mirror the general MBTI distributions in the population as a whole. However, there was one notable exception: Our communities attract a disproportionately high representation of individuals who are visionaries, creative thinkers, collaborators, and problem solvers. This helps to explain why a properly-recruited private online community can be such a powerful vehicle for engaging customers in co-innovation and new product development.