Innovative Motivational Profiling: Comparing Marketing Projective Techniques Versus Linguistic Forensic Techniques

Motivational profiling is commonly done in both marketing and forensic contexts. In an unabashed quest for creativity, many marketers use projective psychological techniques to search for inspiration that leads to ad concepts that will, ultimately, sell more products. Forensic professionals also seek predictive information about motivation in search of facts that will effectively lead to the capture and handling of criminals by using the recent advances found in linguistic technology. Projective profiling techniques produce very soft, opinionated data that are open to interpretation and which has only random relevance to predicting customer behavior. In contrast, linguistic profiling techniques produce hard data that are reliable, valid and very powerful in predicting behavior. The differences in process and results between the creative versus linguistic profiling are compared. Linguistic profiling is clearly the superior approach if prediction of behavior is at issue.