Adam's Understanding of the Customer: Lecture Five: Personality or Self Concept

First off I will be completely honest with you. I wasn't able to attend this weeks lecture, but and it's a good but, i read all of the lecture notes and got some notes off my friend so hopefully this weeks post should make some sense :)

This weeks lecture was all about peoples personalities and self-concepts and how marketers and advertising agencies prey on this to get you and me to buy into a particular product or brand.

The definition of personality according to the Oxford online dictionary is:

The characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s character.

Now from a marketing/advertising perspective this doesn't really sound relevant to use as a basis for an ad campaign or marketing scheme. If you compare this to the definition of Self-Concept:

The mental image or perception that one has of oneself.

You should be able to see that from a marketing point of view self-concept is easier to manipulate than personality. Someone's self-concept can be changed simply by making them think or feel as if they NEED a particular product to be the person they see themselves to be and in most cases want to be. This point is made more apparent when Solomon et al (2001) suggests that People see themselves as they imagine other people see them. So this means that you have 2 very different views but essentially they are both valuable to a marketer. I would however just like to take a minute to break the whole 'self-concept' concept down as it comes in 3 parts:

Self Image - This is the kind of person we think we are.

Ideal Self - This is the kind of person we would like to be.

Self Esteem - This is whether you actually like yourself and is determined by looking and seeing if your Self Image matches that of your Ideal Self.

It is very common though for the consumer's Self Image to be very far away from there ideal self and with the fact that "72% of men and 85% of women are unhappy with at least one aspect of their appearance" (Goleman, D. (1991).).

Its because of this high percentage of unhappy people that marketers prey on. At the end of the day if a woman is unhappy with the way she looks you can sell her make-up which you tell her will make her look 18 again, when we all really know it wont but consumers buy into it anyway... anything that you can sell to a consumer on the basis that it will help them towards their ideal self will fly off the shelves. Yes you can argue it is immoral but at the end of the day business is ruthless and it is just business. Now I will cover this in more detail in later posts but this ties in very nicely with Mazlow's Hierarchy of Need because the top 2 parts of the triangle are esteem and self-actualisation; so after all the other need for humans is fulfilled then we actually begin to look inwards at our selves and begin to asses whether we are actually what we aim and want to be.

Please have a look - http://proquest.umi.com/pqdweb?index=2&did=1464131531&SrchMode=1&sid=3&Fmt=3&VInst=PROD&VType=PQD&RQT=309&VName=PQD&TS=1238594670&clientId=25802

Certain advertisements can be used by Marketers and Advertisers to trigger what is know as 'Social-Comparison' by which the consumer, triggered by the ad, begins to compare themselves to that of the people in the advert. This as you can see gives Marketers and Advertisers a controlling factor over any of their consumers who can potentially be trigger by the advert. [Journal]
Moving on from just the concept of Social-Comparison we also have the consumption factor... 'You are what you consume' Solomon et al (2006). This is the next step up from when I was mentioning Self-Concept earlier and suggests that "A consumers exhibits attachment to an object to the extent that it is used by that person to maintain his or her self-concept." (Douglas, B. H. & Thompson, J. C. (2004).). This is because people will make there first judgements on what a person wares, the car they drive, whether they eat a salad or a steak at dinner; all these things add up and make a pre-perception of a person before they have even spoke.

In summary the whole self-concept theory is the stronger weapon for marketers and advertisers as they can manipulate the self-concept of a consumer through social-comparison theory and coerce them into buying products that they don't really need and are probably above their budget.

Finally here is an ad that I think fit in here. :)

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PERSONALITY

I would like to start talking about a persons personality by starting with a definition by Schiffman and Kanuk (2004) which states a persons personality is:

Those inner psychological characteristics that both determine and reflect how a person responds to his or her environment.

This is a good quote however I personally think that a person's personality stretches further than that; it's not just the inner makings but it must involve how people react and interact with other people and how we deal with different situations. This is covered in more detail by Hollander's research which gives 4 different sections to a person's personality. These are:

The External Aspect: how a person interacts with other people.

The Internal Aspect: a combination of their values & attitudes.

The Dynamic Aspect: faced with a new situation how do they behave e.g. social adjustments.

The Consistent Aspect: their characteristic style.

We then can use these four sections as a basis for personality traits, whether someone is outgoing or not etc. From this Cattell’s Trait Theory of Personality was born with 16 traits which you are either one or the other of. They are:

Reserved--------------------------------Outgoing
Less Intelligent------------------------More Intelligent
Affected by feelings--------------------Emotionally Stable
Humble----------------------------------Assertive
Serious---------------------------------Happy-go-lucky
Expedient-------------------------------Conscientious
Restrained------------------------------Venturesome
Tough-minded----------------------------Tender-minded
Trusting--------------------------------Suspicious
Practical-------------------------------Imaginative
Forthright------------------------------Shrewd
Self-assured----------------------------Apprehensive
Conservative----------------------------Experimenting
Group-dependent-------------------------Self-sufficient
Uncontrolled----------------------------Controlled
Relaxed---------------------------------Tense

Form this starting point other people have conducted questionnaires using the traits and have come up with 4 pairs of 2 letter of which you can only be one or the other. These then make many different 4 letter codes which can tell your, in detail, what your personality type is. Each pair belongs to a specific section and they are as follows:

Pair One: Direction of your energy force

E (Extroversion) - Deals with things, people and situations.

I (Introversion) - Deals with studying ideas, information, explanations and beliefs.

Pair Two: Information Processing

S (Sensing) - You prefer to deal with facts, what you know.

N (Intuition) - You prefer ideas, looking into the unknown, looking at possibilities.

Pair Three: Making Decisions

T (Thinking) - You decide on the basis of logic, using an analytic and detached approach.

F (Feeling) - You decide using values and/or personal beliefs, letting.

Pair Four: Organizing your life

J (Judging) - You prefer your life to be planned in a stable and organised way.

P (Perceiving) - You prefer to go with the flow, to maintain flexibility and respond to events.

As a fun added activity for the lecture Ruth asked us to complete this questionnaire which uses these four pairs. The questionnaire is a more comprehensive version on the Myer Briggs test and was created by Carl Jung.

My results came out to be ENFP so straight away this means that my strongest tendencies are Extrovert, Intuition, Feeling and Perceiving however I was not convinced that 1 try would be sufficient so I waited a week and took the test again and this time I came out as a ESFP which is not surprising as I will have probably answered the questions depending on how I felt that day.

I then decided that I wanted to take another personality test that Ruth had mentioned, this one can be found here and my result was ENTJ which again is different which still just reinforces my idea that although the questionnaires are a good start they are not 100% accurate as the answers are controlled by the feeling of that person at that particular time of the test.

Although they were different each time I did see that they generally all had something in common (The fact that they all started with E) so they can give some good information. Studying consumer's personalities however helps marketers to aim brands at different people's personalities. This is where Brand Personality Framework (Aaker, J. (1997).) comes in. Brand Personality is defined as:

The attribution of human personality traits (seriousness, warmth, imagination, etc.) to a brand as a way to achieve differentiation. Usually done through long-term above-the-line advertising and appropriate packaging and graphics.
(MarketingWeb.com)

Below is a list of common attributes that advertisers use in ads to target specific people: