MF-205 Consumer Behaviour

Part 5: Personality and the Self (Ch. 6 & 7)

Dr Michal Krol
The Self
The self-concept is an individual person as the
object of its own reflective consciousness (i.e.,
how you see yourself).

An identity is an element of the self, and

particularly a category with which one self-
associates.

One’s self-esteem is the extent to which their

self-concept is positive.
Multiple Selves
One can buy products that suit their actual self (self-image congruence
models), or ones they think will let them reach their ideal self. Both aspects
of the self image depend on feedback
from others’ (the looking-glass self).

The dating app Tinder uses computer

vision algorithms to help you choose
your best (i.e., most attractive to
others) picture.
Self Awareness
People differ in their degree of public self-consciousness.

The higher it is, the greater their interest

in impression management products,
like clothes, cosmetics, or, more recently,
AI-powered selfie enhancement filters or
virtual changing rooms.
Are we what we buy, and are brands like people?

“A man's Self is the sum total of all that he can call his, not only
his body and his psychic powers, but his clothes and his house.”
William James

Many consumer researchers believe that our relationships with

brands are fundamental to what we are - similar to and as
important as our relationships with people.
Neuromarketing uses brain scanning (fMRI) to trace how people respond
to products and marketing communications.

For example, researchers showed that a

close relationship with a brand activates the
brain areas responsible for love.

Similarly, DaimlerChrysler took brain scans

of men as they looks at photos of cars like
Ferrari or Porsche, and found activity in the
same regions which are responsible for
face perception (see Ch.9).
A psychiatrist who ran the last study commented:

„They were reminded of faces when they looked at the cars. The lights of the
cars look a little like eyes.”

BUT:

Recall that the brain is super-flexible.

The same parts of the brain can do
different things.

What if somebody told you that:

„a hand is used both for writing and punching, suggesting that when we write
to someone it is because we want to punch them”
Actually, neuroscientists showed that the same area lights up
when chess experts look at realistic chessboard layouts,
suggesting that it is used for processing any highly familiar but
complex visual stimuli
The Salmon Study
Furthermore, fMRI studies recently came under intense scrutiny (recall the
replication crisis). One team of researchers demonstrated a significant
effect when showing social images to a dead salmon.

Given how expensive they are, make

sure an fMRI study commisioned by your
organisation has been pre-registered
and that a multiple-testing correction
has been applied in the analysis.
The Extended Self
More realistically, this framework assumes that material objects only support
our identities.

For example, researchers approached women and gave them one of two
shopping bags to walk around with for an hour.
Women who received a bag from Victoria’s Secret
reported to the researchers that they felt
more sensual and glamorous.

BUT: be wary of experimenter demand effects.

That elements of the extended self, like what we wear
or our body, could influence the inner self, is hugely
important for marketing („buy this and you will feel
better”). An example of this is power posing.

WATCH THIS: The most popular TED Talk ever

But as with everything else that looks too good to be true...
First, Ranehill et al. (2015) showed that the effect of PP on hormones and
risk-tolerance does not replicate.

Then, Simmons and Simonsohn (2017) conducted a meta-analysis of studies

supporting PP, accounting for a
potential selective reporting bias.
This showed that the observed
self-reported increases in feelings of
power were small enough that
replications of these studies would
not be expected to succeed.
Other than as a placebo, PP could also
work by influencing others, which then
feeds back onto you.
But, in this sense, recognizing that
someone is trying to PP you (and that their
power image is fake) can also boost your
own confidence in your objective ability.

“It’s not that I am so strong - it is that they

are wrestling with themselves and
spending their energy on the air.”
Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of Aikdo
Divide et impera
Marketing adapts the old Roman principle of divide
and rule:
Split the consumers into groups based on some
aspect of their self-concept.

Convince the members of a group that the given product not only fits their
actual self-concept but will also (by becoming part of their extended self)
help them reach their ideal self.
If that ideal does not exist, make it up!
Gender identity
A very potent aspect of the self that is often
used in this way is the gender identity.
Neuroscientists identified very few differences
between boys’ vs. girls’ brains
(contrary to what is known as
neurosexism).
However, these tiny gaps grow
disproportionately large with
socialisation.
Gender identity
To build loyalty and involvement,
advertising messages tend to
reinforce existing gender
stereotypes.
Such messages are more
easily processed and
memorised than
counterstereotypical ones.
Body stereotypes
Research shows that „average” faces, obtained
by morphing several real face images, are
considered more attractive.

AI makes generating non-existent faces for use

in advertising increasingly simple, see
www.whichfaceisreal.com.

Interestingly, both males and females

overestimate the degree to which the other gender
finds thin female bodies attractive.
Personality
Personality is one’s a characteristic way of thinking,
feeling, and behaving.

However, it is always an approximation, because we do

not always behave consistently, and the more we try to
classify people into a small number of personality types,
the more inaccurate this is.
The Freudian Perspective
According to Freud, personality is born out of
conflict between three systems:

• the unconscious id, selfishly seeking

immediate gratification (the pleasure
principle)

• the superego, adhering to the societal and

cultural values

• the ego, trying to mediate between the above

based on the reality principle
The Freudian Perspective
According to motivational research that
followed Freud’s in 1950s, the ego relies on the
symbolism in products to compromise between
the demands of the id and the prohibitions of the
superego.
People channel their unacceptable desire into
acceptable substitute product outlets.
Those hidden meanings of
products can be revealed in
depth interviews.
Ego Depletion Effect
Baumeister et al. (1998) demonstrated that self-control or willpower draws upon
a limited pool of mental resources that can be used up.
In their experiment, people who stopped themselves from eating sweets then
quit faster on puzzles than those who were not
similarly tempted.

But a more recent meta-analysis of over 300

studies suggested that the effect is
indistinguishable from zero.
Personality Traits: a modern approach
Researchers used psychometrics to collect a large number of quantitative
measures (related to self-beliefs, behaviour, etc.) for each of many people.

They then used dimension reduction

techniques to study associations
between the measures: e.g., those
described as „conscientious” are likely
described as „always prepared” too.

Thus, measures can be combined into a smaller number of principal factors.

The Big Five
personality traits
It turned out that the variety of
human personalities can be
accurately described using only
five traits (factors).

Take the test here.

Do not confuse the Big 5 with seemingly
similar typologies that have not been
empirically tested, like the Myers-Briggs
indicator (widely used in recruitment).

Based on Carl Jung’s work on collective,

inherited unconscious, it speaks in a language
that appeals to us, seems to fit, but has
no predictive power.

Just like a horoscope.

Brand personality
This is the set of traits people attribute to a product as if it were a person
(anthropomorphism). Marketers often strive to monitor and manipulate it.

For example, Whirpool found that people saw

its products as more feminine than the
competing brands. When asked to imagine
the appliance as a person, many pictured a
family-oriented woman living in the suburbs,
attractive but not flashy.
Brand personality
This is the set of traits people attribute to a product as if it were a person
(anthropomorphism). Marketers often strive to monitor and manipulate it.

Adidas asked kids to imagine the brand was

a person at a party and to tell how they
thought it would behave. They said that
Adidas would be with its pals, talking about
girls. But they also said Nike would be with
the girls! Adidas realised they had work to do.
Aaker’s scale of
Brand personality: criticism
Remember these two? Let us try a similar thing with... a lemon.

In particular, would you say that a lemon is...?

• introvertic (solitary, reserved)
• or extrovertic (outgoing, energetic)
Brand personality: criticism
The fact that, when prompted, people CAN
assign human attributes to almost anything does
not mean that these associations are strong and
that people would freely choose to use them.

In a recent paper, Oklevik et al. (2020) showed that the common brand
personality traits almost never come up when people are asked for free
associations.
Thus, the more general brand image concept may be more realistic.
Buyer persona
BP is a fictional profile of a “core customer” who inspires product design and
communications decisions.

Ocean is a 32-year-old professional single woman making

$100,000 a year. She is “engaged, has her own apartment,
is traveling, fashionable, has an hour and a half to work out
a day.” She is appealing to all women: “If you’re 20 or
graduating, you can’t wait to be her. If you’re 42 years old
with children, you wish you had that time back.”
Like the brand personality concept, the buyer persona is a heuristic stemming
from anthropomorphism and an extrapolation of the Pareto (80/20) principle.

The idea is that very few customer lifestyle segments (defined in terms of the
consumers’ activities, interests, and opinions), account for majority of sales.

The key segments can be identified via a psychographic (survey) analysis and
used to develop product strategies
or communicate products’ attributes.

Ready-made (localised) lifestyle

segmentation typologies and
datasets can be purchased.
Machine-learning segmentation
A more modern approach based on (big) data science is to use an unsupervised
AI technique of cluster analysis.

No a priori hypotheses (data driven approach).

Define a similarity metric for pairwise comparisons between observations

(consumers). The algorithm will split them into groups (clusters) so as to:

• maximize within-cluster homogeneity

• maximize between-cluster
heterogeneity
Machine-learning segmentation
Some of these techniques construct the
clusters hierarchically, and some allow
you to specify the number of clusters
beforehand.

Others allow you visualise the output

before further interpretation
(the example uses the t-SNE
algorithm).
Machine-learning segmentation

One can not only cluster existing data, but also to assign
new examples into the clusters, or impute missing data.

E.g., we might have product purchase data for some

consumers. Based on their other characteristics, we can
assign them to clusters and predict their purchases.

Kosinski et al. did this to predict the Big 5 personality traits

from Facebook likes, developing an algorithm later used
by Cambridge Analytica for political advertising.
A big advantage of the AI techniques is that just
about any type of data can be pre-processed for
use in a cluster analysis.

Hence, consumers can be segmented, e.g.,

based on what objects (identified via computer
vision) are present in their FB photos, or clusters
of complementary products can similarly be
identified.

Next up: Attitudes and persuasive

communication