Consumer Behavior - Chapter 7: Personality, Lifestyles, and Values.

1. Personality

   a. Personality refers to a person’s unique psychological makeup and how it

     consistently influences the way a person responds to his or her environment.

     1)  There has been debate about whether personality changes with situations and

        circumstances.

        a)  Do people appear to act consistently? Research results are mixed.

     2)  Even though inconsistencies have been found in personality research, it still

        continues to be included in marketing strategies.

     3)  Personality dimensions are usually employed in concert with a person’s

        choices of leisure activities, political outlook, aesthetic tastes, and other

        individual factors to segment consumers in terms of lifestyles.

2. Consumer Behavior on the Couch: Freudian Theory

   a. Sigmund Freud developed the idea that much of one’s adult personality stems from

     a fundamental conflict between a person’s desire to gratify his or her physical

     needs and the necessity to function as a responsible member of society. His

     principles (note that these terms do not refer to physiological portions of the consumer’s

     brain) included:

     1)  The id (which is entirely oriented toward immediate gratification). It operates

        on the pleasure principle (behavior guided by the primary desire to maximize

        pleasure and avoid pain).

        a)  The id is selfish.

        b)  The id is illogical (it acts without regard to consequences).

     2)  The superego (which is the counterweight to the id). It is a person’s conscience.

        a)  It internalizes society’s rules.

        b)  It works to prevent the id from seeking selfish gratification.

     3)  The ego (which is the system that mediates between the id and the superego).

        The ego tries to balance these two opposing forces according to the reality

        principle, whereby it finds ways to gratify the id that will be acceptable to the

        outside world. Much of this battle occurs in the unconscious mind.

   b. The Freudian perspective hints that the ego relies on symbolism in products to

     make the compromise between the demands of the id and the prohibitions of the

     superego.

   c. There is a connection between product symbolism and motivation (according to

     Freudian theory).

   d. The first attempts to apply Freudian ideas to understand the deeper meanings of

     products and advertisements were made in the 1950s and were known as

     motivational research.

     1)  This research focused on interpretations from the subconscious (unconscious

        motives). This form of research relies on depth interviews with individual

        consumers.

     2)  Ernest Dichter pioneered this form of interview.

     3)  Motivational research was attacked for two reasons:

        a)  Some felt that it does work, in fact, it worked too well. It gave marketers

           the power to manipulate.

        b)  Others felt that the analysis technique lacked rigor and validity.

     4)  Positives were that:

        a)  It was less expensive than traditional forms of motivational research.

        b)  It was thought to aid in marketing communications.

        c)  Some of the findings seem intuitively plausible after the fact.

   Neo-Freudian Theories

   e. Those who studied after Freud felt that an individual’s personality was more

     influenced by how he or she handled relationships with others than by unresolved

     sexual conflicts. Famous advocates of this thought-path (Neo-Freudians) were:

     1)  Karen Horney—she proposed that people can be described as moving toward

        others (compliant), away from others (detached), or against others

        (aggressive).

        a)  Alfred Adler—proposed that many actions are motivated by people’s desire

           to overcome feelings of inferiority relative to others.

        b)  Harry Stack Sullivan—focused on how personality evolves to reduce 

           anxiety in social relationships.

     2)  Carl Jung—developed analytical psychology. He believed people were shaped

        by the cumulative experiences of past generations. Central to his ideas was the

        collective unconscious (a storehouse of memories inherited from our

        ancestral past).

        a)  Shared memories create archetypes—universally shared ideas and

           behavior patterns.

        b)  These memories would be about birth, death, and the devil (as shown in

           myths, stories, and dreams).

1)      Some brands have personalities. The measuring of such personalities has been problematic. Various methods have been used, including the BrandAsset Archetypes model used by Young & Rubicam.

   Trait Theory

   f. One approach to personality is to focus on the quantitative measurement of

     traits or identifiable characteristics that define a person. Common traits are:

     1)  Extroversion and introversion

     2)  Innovativeness

     3)  Materialism

     4)  Self-consciousness

5)      Need for cognition

6)      Frugality

7)      Environmental Consciousness (new trait)

problems with trait theory in Consumer research

In general, marketing researchers simply have
not been able to predict consumers’ behaviors on the basis of measured personality traits.
These are some logical explanations for these less-than-stellar results:

Many of the scales are not sufficiently valid or reliable; they do not adequately measure what they are supposed to measure, and their results may not be stable over time.
●● Psychologists typically develop personality tests for specific populations (e.g., people
who are mentally ill); marketers then “borrow” them to apply to a more general population where they have questionable relevance.
●● Often marketers don’t administer the tests under the appropriate conditions; people
who are not properly trained may give them in a classroom or at a kitchen table.
●● The researchers often make changes in the instruments to adapt them to their own situations and needs; in the process, they may add or delete items and rename variables.
Thesead hoc changes dilute the validity of the measures and also reduce researchers’
ability to compare results across consumer samples.
●● Many trait scales measure gross, overall tendencies    

  

Brand Personality

i.                    Products, like consumers, have personalities.

ii.                  A brand personality is the set of traits people attribute to a product as if it were a person.

     1)  Brand equity refers to the extent that a consumer holds strong, favorable, and

        unique associations about a brand in memory. Examples of personality

        dimensions include old fashioned, wholesome, traditional, and lively, among others.

     2)  Consumers seem to have little difficulty in assigning personality qualities to

        all sorts of inanimate products. 

     3) Forging a successful brand personality is key to building brand loyalty but it is often difficult.  Many younger consumers can detect if a brand is not living up to its claims and is inauthentic.  As a result, consumers rebel and today they vent on the Internet.  Researchers call this the “Doppelganger brand image” – one that looks like the original but is in fact a critique of it.

     4) The creation and communication of a distinctive brand personality is one of

        the primary ways marketers can make a product stand out from the competition

        and inspire years of loyalty to it. This is called animism (whereby inanimate

        objects are given qualities that make them somehow alive). It is an old

        practice.

        Consumers tend to anthropomorphize objects, in other words give them human characteristics.

3. Lifestyles and Psychographics

   Lifestyle: Who We Are, What We Do

   a. Lifestyle refers to a pattern of consumption reflecting a person’s choices of how he

     or she spends time and money. It is (in an economic sense) how one elects to

     allocate income.

     1)  A lifestyle marketing perspective recognizes that people sort him- or herself into

        groups on the basis of the things they like to do, how they like to spend their

        leisure time, and how they choose to spend their disposable income.

     2)  These choices create marketing opportunities and chances for segmentation.

     3)  Lifestyles can be thought of as group identities. It is more than economics and

        income disposal choices.

        a)  Lifestyle is a statement of who one is and who one is not.

        b)  Other terms used to describe lifestyle are:

           1. Taste public

           2. Consumer group

           3. Symbolic community

           4. Status culture

        c)  Lifestyles are not set in stone unlike deep-seated values discussed in

           Chapter 4.

       d) One emerging lifestyle segment is the “Urban Consumer.”  These are generally 18-34 year olds mostly African American and are into the hip-hop culture. 

     1)  Co-branding strategies are used by marketers to combine products that appeal to

        similar patterns of behavior.

     2)  Product complementarity occurs when the symbolic meanings of different

        products are related to each other.

     3)  These products, termed consumption constellations, are used by consumers to

        define, communicate, and perform social roles.

   Psychographics

   e. Psychographics involves the use of psychological, sociological, and

     anthropological factors to determine how the market is segmented by the

     propensity of groups within the market (and their reasons) to make a particular

     decision about a product, person, ideology, or otherwise hold an attitude or use a

     medium.

     1)  Psychographics can help a marketer fine-tune its offerings to meet the needs

        of different segments.

     2)  The roots of psychographics were in:

        a)  Motivational research, which involves intensive one-to-one interviews and

           projective tests (yields a lot of information on a few people).

        b)  Quantitative survey research (at the other extreme) that uses large-scale

           demographic research techniques.

     3)  Psychographics is often used interchangeably with lifestyle.

     4)  Psychographics focuses on why people buy. Demographics tells us who buys.

     5)  Psychographic analysis can take several forms:

        a)  A lifestyle profile. looks for items that differentiate between users and nonusers of a
product.

        b)  A product-specific product. identifies a target group and then profiles these consumers on
product-relevant dimensions

        c)  A general lifestyle segmentation. places a large sample of respondents into homogenous groups based on similarities of their overall preferences

        d)  A product-specific segmentation. tailors questions to a product category. For example, if a researcher wants to conduct research for a stomach medicine, she might rephrase the item, “I worry too much” as, “I get stomach problems if I worry too much.”
This allows her to more finely discriminate among users of competing brands.

   f. Most contemporary psychographic research attempts to group consumers according

     to some combination of three categories of variables—activities, interests, and

     opinions (AIOs).

     1)  To group consumers into common AIO categories, respondents are given a

        long list of statements and are asked to indicate how much they agree with

        each one. Lifestyle is “boiled down” by how consumers spend their time, what

        they find interesting and important, and how they view themselves and the

        world around them, as well as demographic information.

     2)  Which lifestyle segments produce the bulk of consumers? This is answered

        (marketers must be careful to observe) by the 80/20 rule where only 20

        percent of a product’s users account for 80 percent of the volume of the

        product sold (in other words, the heavy users).

     3)  After “heavy users” are identified and understood, the brand’s relationship to

        them is considered.

   g. Uses of psychographic segmentation include:

     1)  To define the target market.

     2)  To create a new view of the market.

     3)  To position the product.

     4)  To better communicate product attributes.

      5)  To develop overall strategy.

     6)  To market social and political issues.

   h. Many research companies and advertising agencies have developed segmentation

     typologies that divide people into segments. Because these are largely proprietary,

     however, they are hard to get.

   i.  One well-known and widely used segmentation system is VALS (Values and

     Lifestyles), developed at what is now SRI International in California. Nine

     lifestyle clusters have been identified. VALS2 extends this concept and uses eight

     groups that are determined by psychological characteristics and “resources” (such

     as income, education, energy levels, and eagerness to buy). The groups include:

     1. Thinkers—satisfied, reflective, and comfortable.

     2. Achievers—career-oriented, avoid risk, self-discovery.

     3. Experiencers—impulsive, young, offbeat, love risk.

     4. Believers—strong principles, favor proven brands.

     5. Strivers—like achievers, but with fewer resources, need approval.

     6.Makers—action-oriented, self-sufficiency, do-it-yourselfers.

     7.Strugglers—bottom-of-the-ladder, immediate gratification.

Values

   b. A value is a belief that some condition is preferable to its opposite.

     1)  Two people can believe in the same behaviors but their underlying belief

        systems may be quite different.

     2)  Consumers often seek out those that have similar belief systems to their own.

 

Core Values

   c. Every culture has a set of core values that it imparts to its members. Core values do

     change over time. In many cases, values are universal.

     1)  What sets cultures apart is the relative importance or ranking of universal

         values. This set of rankings is a culture’s value system.

     2)  Every culture is characterized by its members’ endorsement of a value system.

     3)  Each set of core values that uniquely define a culture is taught to that culture

         by socialization agents (parents, friends, and teachers).

         a)  The process of learning the beliefs and behaviors endorsed by one’s own

            culture is termed enculturation.

         b)  Acculturation is the process of learning the value system and behaviors

            of another culture.

   How Values link to Consumer Behavior

   d. Despite their importance, values have not been as widely applied to direct

     examination of consumer behavior as might be expected. The reason is that many

     values are very general or relative by nature (e.g., freedom, security, inner peace).

     Because values drive much of consumer behavior, it could be said that virtually all

     consumer research is ultimately related to the identification and measurement of

     values.

     1)  Research has tended to classify values as being:

        a)  Cultural Values (such as security).

        b)  Consumption-specific (such as convenient shopping or prompt service).

        c)  Product-specific (such as ease of use or durability).

     2)  Research in values:

        a)  The Rokeach Value Survey—the psychologist Milton Rokeach identified

           two sets of values:

           1. Terminal values—desired end-states that apply to many different

              cultures.

           2. Instrumental values—composed of actions needed to achieve these

              terminal values.

        b)  The List of Values (LOV)—identifies nine consumer segments based on

           the values they endorse (and then relates these to consumption).

        c)  The Means-End Chain Model—specific product attributes are linked at

           increasing abstraction to terminal values via “laddering.” Laddering is

           a technique whereby consumers’ associations between specific attributes

           and general consequences are uncovered.