Personality & Lifestyles

Chapter 6
 Freudian theory

• 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. This
struggle is carried out in the mind among 3
systems).
 Freudian systems
• The id is entirely oriented toward immediate gratification it is the
party animal of the mind. It operates according to the pleasure
principle; behavior misguided by the primary desire to maximize
pleasure and avoid pain. The id is selfish and illogical. It directs a
person’s psychic energy toward pleasurable acts without regard for
any consequences.
• The superego is the counter-weight to the id. This system is
essentially the person’s conscience. It internalizes society’s rules
(especially as communicated by parents) and works to prevent the id
from seeking selfish gratification.
• The ego is the system that mediates between the id and the
superego. It is in a way a referee in the fight between temptation and
virtue. The ego tries to balance these opposing forces according to
the reality principle, whereby it finds ways to gratify the id that will
be acceptable to the outside world. These conflicts occur on an
unconscious level, so the person is not necessarily aware of the
underlying reasons for behavior.
 Neo-Freudian Theories
• Trait theory:
• One approach to personality is to focus on the quantitative
measurement of traits, or identifiable characteristics that
define a person. For example people can be distinguished by
the degree to which they are socially outgoing.
• Some specific traits that are relevant to consumer behavior
include: innovativeness (the degree to which a person likes to
try new things); materialism (amount of emphasis placed on
acquiring and owning products); self-consciousness (the
degree to which a person deliberately monitors and controls
the image of the self that is projected to others), and need for
cognition (the degree to which a person likes to think about
things and by extension expend the necessary effort to
process brand information).
Problems with trait theory in
consumer research
• 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 stable over time.
• Personality tests are often developed for specific
populations (e.g., mentally ill people); these
tests are then borrowed and applied to the
general population where their relevance is
questionable.
• Often the tests are not administered under the
appropriate conditions, they may be given in a
classroom or over a kitchen table by people who
are not properly trained.
• The researchers often make changes in the instruments to
adapt them to their own situations, in the process deleting or
adding items and renaming variables. These ad hoc changes
dilute the validity of the measures and also reduce
researchers’ ability to compare results across consumer
samples.
• Many trait scales are intended to measure gross, overall
tendencies (e.g., emotional stability or introversion); these
results are then used to make predictions about purchases of
specific brands.
• In many cases, a number of scales are given with no advance
thought about how these measures should be related to
consumer behavior. The researchers then use a shotgun
approach, following up on anything that happens to look
interesting.
 Brand personality
• 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
process can be understood in terms of animism,
the practice found in many cultures whereby
inanimate objects are given qualities that make
them somehow alive. Animism is in some cases a
part of a religion: sacred objects, animals, or places
are believed to have magical qualities or to contain
the spirits of ancestors.
 Types of Animism
• Two types of animism can be identified to describe
the extent to which human qualities are attributed
to the product.
• Level 1: in the highest order of animism, the object
is believed to be possessed by the soul of a being as
is sometimes the case for spokespersons in
advertising. This strategy allows the consumer to
feel that the spirit of the celebrity is available
through the brand. In other cases, a brand may be
strongly associated with a loved one alive or
deceased (my grandmother always served
knottsberry farm jam).
• Level 2: objects are anthropomorphized,
given human characteristics. A cartoon
character or mythical creation may be
treated as if it were a person, and even
assumed to have human feelings. Think
about familiar spokes characters such as
Fido dido, or the Michelin Man, deep Blue,
or even the frustration some people feel
when they come to believe their computer is
smarter than they are or may even be
conspiring to make them crazy.
 Lifestyles and
psychographics
• Lifestyle: who we are, what we do.
• Lifestyle refers to a pattern of consumption reflecting a
person’s choices of how he or she spends time and money. In
an economic sense, one’s lifestyle represents different
products and services, and to specific alternatives within
these categories.
• A lifestyle marketing perspective recognizes that people
sort themselves into groups on the basis of the things they
like to do, how like to sped their leisure time and how they
choose to spend their disposable income.
• Product complementarity occurs when the symbolic
meanings of different products are related to each other.
These sets of products, termed consumption constellations,
are used by consumers to define communicate, and perform
social roles.
 Psychographics
• Definition: the use of psychological,
sociological, and anthropological
factors. .. to determine how the
market is segmented by the
propensity/tendency 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.
 Psychographic studies
• A lifestyle profile that looks for items that differentiate
between users and nonusers of a product.
• A product specific profile that identifies a target group and
then profiles these consumers on product – relevant
dimensions,
• A study as concern for the environment is analyzed to see
which personality traits are most likely to be related to it.
• A general lifestyle segmentation in which a large sample of
respondents are placed into homogenous groups based on
similarities of respondents of their overall preferences.
• A product specific segmentation, in which questions used in
a general approach are tailored to a product category for
example in a study done specifically for a stomach medicine, the
items “I worry too much” might be rephrased as “I get stomach
problems if I worry too much. This allows the researcher to more
finely discriminate between users of competing brands.
 AIOs
• Activities, Interests and Opinions
• Most contemporary Psychographic
research attempts to group consumers
according to some combination of
three categories of variable activities,
interests, and opinions which are
know as AIOs.
• Table 6-3
 Uses of Psychographic
Segmentation
• To define the target market.
• To create a new view of the market.
• To position the product.
• To better communicate product
attributes.
• To develop overall strategy
 VALS
• One well-known segmentation system is the values and
lifestyles (VALSTM) system. The original (VALSTM) system was
based on how consumers agreed or disagreed with various
social issues, such as abortion rights.
• The current (VALS2TM) system uses a battery of 39 items (3
psychological and four demographic) to divide adults into
groups each with distinctive characteristics.
• The top (VALS2TM) group is termed actualizers, who are
successful consumers with many resources. This many
resources. This group is concerned with social issues and is
open to change. As one indication of this group’s interest in
cutting edge technology, while only one in ten American adults
is an Actualize half of all regular internet users belong to this
category. The next three groups also have sufficient resources
but differ in their outlooks on life.
• Fulfilleds are satisfied, reflective, and comfortable. They tend to
be practical and value functionality.
• Achievers are career oriented and prefer predictability over
risk or self-discovery.
• Experiencers are impulsive, young and enjoy offbeat or risky
experiences. The next four groups have fewer resources.
• Believers have strong principles, and favor proven brands.
• Strivers are like achievers, but with fewer resources. They
are very concerned about the approval of others.
• Makers are action oriented and tend to focus their energies
on self-sufficiency. They will often be found working on their
cars, canning their own vegetables, or building their own
houses,.
• Strugglers are at the bottom of the economic ladder. They
are most concerned with meeting the needs of the moment,
and have limited ability to acquire anything beyond the basic
goods needed for survival.
• Figure 6-2
 Regional consumption
differences
• Food preferences
• The arts and entertainment
• Geo-demography: analytical techniques that
combine data on consumer expenditures
and other socioeconomic factors with
geographic information about the areas in
which people live in order to identify
consumers who share common
consumption patterns. { Pockets of like-
minded people}
 Trend forecasting
• Environmentalism and green marketing.
• A return in value
• Time poverty
• Disillusionment of working women
• Decreased emphasis on nutrition and exercise
• Cocooning
• Non-consumption
• Individualization and mass customization
• A laid back lifestyle
• Life in the fast lane