As audience-first marketers, we focus first and foremost on understanding the people our brands need to reach – identifying the key characteristics that make up their personalities and shape their interactions with the world.
Last year, we undertook a comprehensive analysis of over 720,000 organic social media posts to develop a comprehensive personality profile of Khaleeji mums.
Our Methodology
Using Sila, our proprietary Arabic-native, AI-enabled social listening tool, we collected and analysed the social media content of 240 Khaleeji mums actively posting and sharing content relating to motherhood, childrearing, and family life as part of a larger personal ‘lifestyle’ brand. Our mums ranged in age from 30 to 50, and while all of our panelists reside in the UAE or KSA, UAE mums comprised a distinct majority of our sample.
We next gathered over 3,000 twitter interactions per mum for a real-time, natural-language analysis that mapped our mums’ content against the Big Five personality traits. Unlike survey or focus group responses, which can include significant amounts of ‘noise’ and may not accurately reflect the respondents’ true feelings, organic social media content and interactions provide comparatively unfiltered insight into our subjects based not only on the content posted, but the language of individual tweets.
The result? A comprehensive portrait of the typical GCC mum developed from raw data taken straight from our subject group.
The ‘Big Five’ Personality Traits
Sometimes also referred to as OCEAN, the Big Five personality model is among the best-known frameworks for understanding human psychology. Developed by several personality researchers over the course of several decades, the theory posits that most of what we consider ‘personality’ can be defined by five key characteristics:
- Openness to experience – inventive and curious vs consistent and cautious
- Conscientiousness – efficient and organised vs extravagant and careless
- Extraversion – outgoing and energetic vs solitary and reserved
- Agreeableness – friendly and compassionate vs challenging and callous
- Neuroticism – sensitive and nervous vs resilient and confident
As audience-first digital marketers, D/A uses the Big Five model to better understand the core traits of a target market and develop brand strategies that resonate deeply based on how consumers see and experience the world.
Who is the GCC Mum?
While we may not know them personally, our analysis has given us some deep insights into how mums in the UAE and KSA perceive themselves and their relationships, as well as how these perceptions influence their buying patterns.
Primary and Secondary Personality Traits
Analysis of our audience produced a portrait of a woman strongly oriented towards others. Extraversion and Agreeableness were the most strongly expressed of the five traits, with panelists scoring high in areas such as ‘sociable’, ‘excitement seeking’, and ‘empathetic’. In more concrete terms, our mums have a strong drive to help others and draw energy from interacting with friends, family, and the broader community.
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Unsurprisingly, our mums also reported a high need for stability and closeness and scored poorly in traits like ‘unstructured’.Openness and Neuroticism were likewise expressed weakly, meaning our mums take a more cautious approach to the world and might be described as a bit nervous.
In sum, Khaleeji mums demonstrate a marked degree of Extraversion and Agreeableness, their primary personality traits, with Conscientiousness a powerful secondary trait. Openness and Neuroticism, by contrast, play an insignificant role in the typical GCC mum’s personality.
