Personality and Lifestyle in Consumer Behaviour

Consumer behaviour is a central topic in marketing and consumer behaviour is totally depends on consumer’s personality and life style. We can understand it better by understanding the whole concept of personality and life style.

Person always try to blame on any of two traits for his behaviour. (1) Internal traits: In this traits if person believe that whatever he/she is doing only because he want to do it or he couldn’t do it because he was not able to do it. (2) External traits: In this traits person always tend to blame external factors for his/her behaviour. he thinks that what he is doing is only because his surrounding is making him to do this and if he fails to do something, it is only because his surroundings was not in his favour. Let us understand some are the other things affects to person’s behaviour in detail.

What is personality?

Personality refers to a person’s unique psychological makeup and how it consistently influences the way a person responds to her environment. In other words personality made up from the sum of characteristic such as thoughts, behaviours and feelings by which a person can be unique or different from others. Personality takes place in the human and remains almost consistent throughout life.

Main characteristics of personality:-

There are mainly five characteristics of personality. They are as under.

Consistency: there is usually identifiable order and constancy to behaviours. Generally people behave same ways in different situations. Psychological and physiological: personality is a psychological creation, but it is also influenced by natural process and requirements. Impact behaviours and actions: Personality influences how we shift and take actions in different situations as well as it make us to behave in particular way. Multiple expressions: personality is not demonstrated only by behaviour but it can also be demonstrated by our feelings, thoughts regarding particular subject, close relationship and other social connections.

4. MAJOR THEORIES OF PERSONALITY:

There are main five important theories existing which are as under.

4.1. Biological Theories: This theory was developed by Hans Eysenck. Different aspects of personality were linked with biological process by him. He believed that a person who is introverts has high level of cortical which leads him to avoid stimulations and on the other hand the person who is extroverts has low level of cortical arousal which makes him to find out stimulating practices.

Get Help With Your Essay

If you need assistance with writing your essay, our professional essay writing service is here to help!
Find out more about our Essay Writing Service

According to this theory genetics are accountable for personality. Our physical characteristics such as our body type, eye colour, height, hair colour, and general looks are mainly determined by biological components. These physical characteristics play an important role in our personality. Yes, I do believe that the environment play an important role in human development, such as a person be a introversion or extroversion but it is also true that biological links also have effects on it. For example, if a person has an attractive look then his look can be a motivation for him to be a confident and extroversion. On the other side, the person who has ugly look usually feel shy from being with other people and stay introversion.

4.2. Behavioural Theories: This theory was developed by B. F. Skinner. According to this theory personality is a result of connection between individual and surroundings. Surroundings have a big effect on building a personality of a person. Every person is different according to the surrounding he tends to dissolve himself into the atmosphere, thus resulting in a different personality. For example, we define two people, one from well to do educated family and the other is from slum. The one born and brought up in an educated family was been feed up in a golden spoon by educated well manners and sophisticated surroundings and thus helped him to build an attractive personality. On the other hand, the one from slum was not been taken care by his parents due to financial issues and was not able to get a good education which lead him to get in contact with people who were ill-mannered, uneducated and unsophisticated. This was the biggest drawback of his personality building the other way round.

4.3. Psychodynamic theories: This theory was developed by Sigmund Freud. According to this theory personality is influence of the unconscious brain and childhood experiences. Dynamic psychology can be defined as the interrelationship mind and personality. According to Freud there are main three components of personality. (1) ID: Id is the storage of all needs and wants. By which we know that what kind of need we want to satisfy first and how we want to satisfy it. (2) The ego: – ego is similar to the administrative and it has a conscious control to us. It monitors us internally. It efforts to stabilizes the hasty requirements of the id with the superego and actuality – it is the preventing influence. (3) The superego: superego is for internal expressions of principles or moral values.

Every person has a positive psychology and a negative psychology. The person’s personality influenced by the conscious and unconscious influences. Every person has their own past experiences and unique history which impact on shaping their different personalities. For example, a small girl seeing her parents fighting every day, which leads to her angry, disturb and introversion personality. This is the result of anger in her unconscious mind.

4.4 Humanist Theories: This theory was influenced by Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow. According to this theory free motivations and individual practices are important in development of personality. This theory gives importance to the concept of self actualization, which is necessary for personal growth and motivates human behaviour. According to this theory, the person’s one-sided view is more important than the idea as a whole in building his personality. Only a person chooses what they do in spite of the environmental factors. The way different person make different choices, build up different personality. This theory gives more importance to the self concept in building a personality of a person. It gives more importance to goodness of human beings. Every person have different level of self esteem and according to that level they all give different preferences to different things from beginning which make them behave differently.

4.5 Trait Theories (five factors theory of personality): This is very important theory for personality. According to this theory, personality is a result of many traits together. Here traits mean constant characteristics which lead an individual to act certain ways.

5. Important traits of personality:

There are mainly five core traits which interact and play an important role to form human personality.

Extraversion or surgency: this trait make different personality by identifying either the person is talkative, assertive, and highly active or the person is silent, passive and reserved.

Agreeableness or pleasantness: this trait make different personality by identifying either the person is kind, trustworthy, and warm or he is hostile, selfish, and not trustworthy.

Conscientiousness or dependability: this trait make different personality by identifying either the person is well organized, careful, and reliable or he is careless, negligent, and unreliable.

Neuroticism or emotional: trait make different personality by identifying either the person is nervous, moody, and temperamental or he is confident, stable and predictable.

Openness or intellect: according to the theory we can find different personality by contrasting person’s imagination, creativity and curiosity with shallowness and imperceptiveness.

After identifying all the above traits of personality we can identify the personality of particular person. There are mainly five personalities by which we can differentiate a person.

Types of personality

The overbearing type: This personality includes the person with deep look of worry that spoil their eyes, which is frequently attended by knitted eyebrows and an ever ready snoozing head while talking to seniors. These people desire to impress themselves on other people in different situations and are constantly show up with full of ideas. Connecting the values and traits got at birth from their identical overbearing grandmothers, they desire to show themselves correct every step of the way. The category which would make that would make excited beaver appear similar to lazy sloths, they unlock the gate one step advance then chance can knock on it. Hence, although they may be a precious talent in an office, always win the trust of bosses and seniors.

The Pacific Type: An ever enjoyable smile and light impressive eyes, come with ‘ladies first’ kind of rare-to-find-today character, polite with good manners domain a person in this category. We can characterize them by three ‘C’s – calm, composed and containing common sense. Although because of these personality traits they can be proved better husbands than better boss. They have a rather laid back attitude, attend by a non-dominating nature yet in ownership of superior decision making skills, and would label a person as being the pacific type.

The Insouciant Type: If we see a person with a pensive appear in his eyes, and no attitude, then we can categorize that person as the insouciant type. This kind of people is effective listeners but sometimes it looks like they are listening, actually they might be dreaming or thinking something else. They are always seems half sleepy and lazy. They can’t be proved important to their work.

The Talkative Type: These are the people who love to talk. It is hard to find the way to shut them up. We can put Lawyers, secretaries, mothers-in-law and all this kind of people to this category. This kind of people is least attractive and not effective to make new relations with others.

The Jittery Type: When we talk about jittery type people, we can say that nervousness is in their blood. They have shining eyes, trembling lips and an overall look show like that person has the secret knowledge of a huge future disaster.

The different five personality’s person has different life style according to their personality. It is very important for marketers to understand different Life style of different people before they target any group for their product. But as it is very hard for marketers to recognize personality of a person as a whole, they always try to identify personality by using a person’s “self concept”. The reason is person’s personality always be interpreted by people with whom he/she is interacting, at the same time the person has his/her own image of his/her personality, called self concept which make a person to live particular life style. According to which a person make a purchase decisions. This is very important to understand for marketers.

BRAND PERSONALITY:

Definition: A set of human characteristics that are attributed to a brand name. A brand personality is something to which the consumer can relate, and an effective brand will increase its brand equity by having a consistent set of traits. This is the added-value that a brand gains, aside from its functional benefits. There are five main types of brand personalities: excitement, sincerity, ruggedness, competence and sophistication. (Taken from http://www.investopedia.com/terms/b/brand-personality.asp )

As every person has their own personality, every brand has its own personality too. Brand personality makes the identifying the product easy for different personality people. People who are from different cultures are usually tended to recognise common brands in their culture in terms of different personality dimensions. Successful brand personality is the main way to build up strong brand loyalty. But it is very hard and challenging to create successful brand personality. For the different personality group of people, it is very important to express their personality to others and they use buying behaviour towards particular brands which represents a particular personality or status of a person. They represent it by having brand equity. Different people have different level of brand equity as it is related to self concept and the importance given by a person to his/her status or his choice. Some people have strong brand equity by holding strong, favourable and unique associations with a brand in memory. Depending to the level of holding brand equity, different people show different level of willingness to pay for the same brand. For example, status-oriented people seem to pay high for the branded product as it is the source to represent their status on others. For marketers it is very important to gain brand image first to gain strong brand personality. If a particular brand performs very well for a long time period then that brand gain good brand image as well as good personality. But brand image is a subjective concept. Different personality people have different image about particular brand. For a Pacific type of personality person particular sophisticated brand is a symbol of his personality so that brand will have strong brand image and personality for that kind of person and they will tend to pay more for that brands but on the other hand, the talkative type of person this brands are more sophisticated which doesn’t fit on their personality, will have a negative image in their mind. So it is very important for the marketers to understand different types of personalities of different group of people before they target that group for their product.

LIFESTYLE

People who are from the similar social class, culture or from same occupation may have very different lifestyles. In a current society, people are always free to select the set of activities they like to perform and the product and services they like to consume that define themselves and create a social identity they communicate to others. Life style is pattern or the way to live a life which a person decides according to his/her psychographics. In other words life style defines a pattern of consumption that reflects a person’s choices on how to spend his time and money. This pattern of consumption totally depends on three major AIO dimensions-activities, interest, and opinions. According to different interest, activities and opinions that different people posses, there are classifications of eight groups based on two major dimensions: one is self-orientation and another is resources.

Self-orientation:

Principle-oriented consumers: these are the people who make their purchase decisions based on their views of the world. This kind of people always gives importance to their own choices and preferences. Their purchase decisions can be influenced by mainly advertisements or promotions. They make purchase decisions only based on their stimulations towards the products regardless the value of those products in others view. They are usually brand loyal people and hard to change their buying behaviour as it is not influenced by other people’s opinions.

Status-oriented buyers: These are the people who make their purchase decisions based on the opinions and actions of other people. They tend to change their choice based on the opinion of other people. For this kind of people it is very important to maintain certain status or image on other people’s mind in their society. So, they give more importance to other people’s view and value of products more than their own choice. For marketers it is very easy to target this kind of people as they tend to follow current trends.

Action-oriented buyers: these are the people who make their purchase decisions based on their wish for activity, diversity, and risk taking. This group of people are easy to target for new products. They are not steady in their purchasing behaviour pattern and their choice. It is hard to identify their buying behaviour as it is easily influenced by advertisements and promotional things but they keep changing their purchases depending on their requirements and wishes to use different products.

We can further classify each orientation consumers into two categories. One is those who have plentiful resources and another are those who have nominal resources. This classification depends on people’s income level (high or low), as well as weather they have high or low level of education, health, energy, self confidence and other factors. Depending on all these factors people can be classified in two categories.

Actualizers: this group includes people having very high levels of resources. They can utilize their resources and can treat in any or all self-orientations.

Strugglers: this group includes people having low levels of resources to fulfil their wishes and to categorize themselves into any consumer orientation.