Marketers have used three personality theories to describe consumers:
- Psychoanalytic theory or Freud’s theory.
- Sociopsychological theory.
- Trait theory.
- Psychoanalytical theory
This theory was given by Sigmund Freud. This theory stresses the unconscious nature of personality as a result of childhood conflicts. According to this theory, the human personality system consists of the id; ego, superego and conflicts are derived from these three components.
Researchers who apply this theory to marketing believe that id and superego operate to create unconscious motives for purchasing certain products. Although consumers are primarily unaware of their true reasons for buying what they buy. Focus of marketers is on developing means to incomes these unconscious motives and applying psychoanalytical theory to marketing is known as motivational research.
- Socio-psychological theory
According to this theory, individual and society are interlinked. This theory disagrees with Freud’s contention. It is also called as Neo-Freudian theory. Researchers believe that social relationships are fundamental to the formation and development of personality.
Karen Horney was a social theorist. She believed that personality is developed as an individual learns to cope with basic anxieties that stems up from parent – child relationships. She proposed that individuals could be classified into three personality groups:
Complaint – Those individuals who moved toward others. They desire to be loved, wanted and appreciated.
Aggressive – Those individuals who move against others. They desire to excel and win admiration.
Detached – Those individuals who move away from others. They desire independence, self-sufficiency and freedom from obligations.
- Trait theory
This theory has been most widely used for measuring personality because it is a quantitative approach. This theory states that an individual’s personality is composed of definite attributes called trait. A trait can be defined as any distinguishable, relatively enduring way in which one individual differs from another. For example, sociability relaxed style, amount of internal control.
Trait theorists construct personality inventories and ask respondents to respond to many items by agreeing or disagreeing with certain statements or expressing likes or dislikes for certain situations or types of people. These items are then are statistically analyzed and reduced to a few personality dimensions.
Single trait personality tests, which measure just one trait, such as self-confidence, are increasingly being developed for use in consumer behaviour studies. These personality tests can be designed according to the need to measure traits such as consumer innovativeness, consumer susceptibility to inter personal influence, consumer materialism and consumer ethnocentrism.
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