Personal Characteristics
Race, Gender, Age
Race
Products and services are targeted at different races.
Most companies that manufacture hair, skin and other beauty care products, such as Revlon and Amka, group market their products by focusing on the differences between the needs and wants of different racial groups instead of using race as a discriminating factor.
The SAARF Universal LSM has developed a tool called the Living Standards Measurement (LSM) for assisting marketers in South Africa to deal with the issue of race.
Gender
The terms gender and sex are used interchangeably to refer to whether a person is biologically male or female.
This is a very important trait to marketers, since there are significant differences between men and women and their consumption patterns.
There are two major factors that impact on products and that marketers must take into consideration when selling their products.
- The first is the impact of gender on the products
- The second is the changing roles of men and women in the use of various products and services.
Age
Our taste in food, clothes, furniture and recreation is often related to our age. Adults experience certain transformations as they go through life and their behaviour changes as they mature. Marketers should consider critical life events or transitions, such as marriage, child birth, illness, relocation, divorce, career change, and death of a spouse or partner, as these circumstances give rise to new needs. The key point that you need to understand in this section is that marketers must understand exactly what they refer to when they discuss the concept of age. The definition of age has to take chronological age, biological age and psychological age into consideration. The impact of generation X and generation Y on marketing is also significant and the differences between these generations should be studied.
Age sub cultures:
- Seniors: (new age vs traditional)
- Baby Boomers : The generation born after WW2
- Generation X: Born between the 60’’s and 70’s
- Generation Y: Born between 70’s and 90’s
Many segmentation strategies can be grouped into these four categories:
- Geographic and geo-demographic.
- Demographic.
- Behavioural attitudes.
- Psychographic.
• Geographic and geo-demographic.
Region, climate and population density
- for example, SABMiller can decide to segment its market by using a combination of variables, such as region (Mpumalanga and Gauteng), for its main distribution areas, while using age to classify and segment its market (no under 18s allowed to consume their product).
• Demographic.
Age, sex, education, occupation, religion, race, nationality, family size and family cycle
• Behavioural attitudes.
Knowledge benefits the use of status, usage rates, loyalty status, readiness to buy and occasions.
• Psychographic.
Personality and lifestyle
- Clover-Danone, for example, segment its market by aiming its yoghurt at health-conscious consumers.
Nature of Personality
The varying elements of personality can be easily used or controlled to present radically different products.
Marketers can use each of the responses to position their products strategically, as well as to differentiate between them so that they appeal to different personalities.
Personality comprises those inner psychological characteristics that both determine and reflect the way a person responds to his or her environment.
It is also described as an individual’s consistency in coping with his or her environment. It;s the consistant pattern of responses to stimmuli from internal and external sources.
- Examples of personality traits include confidence, dominance, autonomy, deference, sociability, defensiveness, and adaptability. After studying this part of the work you should be able to give a detailed definition of the concept of personality.
How can Personality Traits be classified?
Provide examples of personality traits.
Personality traits are classified as a psychographic segmentation strategy and this factor is explored in the remainder of this section.
- Examples: confidence, dominance, autonomy, deference, sociability, defensiveness, adaptability
When studying personality, four characteristics are of vital importance:
• Personality reflects individual differences. • Personality is consistent and enduring. • Personality is conceived as a complete actualisation of oneself in an environment. • Personality can change.
• Personality reflects individual differences.
- Due to early childhood experiences, cultural exposure and personal motivation there are difference in each persons heredity.
- Eventhough no one is a like, we are similiar in many ways in terms of a single characteristic.
- The value of personality lies in the fact that marketers can categorise people in different groups based on a few traits.
• Personality is consistent and enduring.
An individuals personality is characterised by stability during change.
Consistency gives direction to a persons behaviour and sustains them in the face of experience that changes all the time.
Consistency refers to enduring, not unchanging, qualities of personality.
It also gives the behaviour of a person a measure of predictability.
It’s unreasonable for marketers to try and change a personality ,at best they can learn wich personality characteristics influence a particular customer responses, and attempt to appeal to a relevant personality.
Personality is only one of a combination of factors that influence how a customer behaves.
Tradition- directed behaviour segmentation
Marketing segmentation that is based on the assumption that a customers personality and behaviour changes little over time is called tradition-directed behaviour segmentation.
Thisis a form of psycographic and lifestyle segmentation
• Personality is conceived as a complete actualisation of oneself in an environment.
- An individuals seperate acts cannot be understood apart from the whole person; neither can a person be understood apart from it’s environment.
- Some of the most important characteristics of the whole individual are derived from their environment, especially from the socio culture environment with all it’s customs.
- Differece in personility are expressions not only of inherent tendencies, but even more of events in the social environment.
• Personality can change.
Eventhough personality tends to be consistent and enduring it may change under certain circumstances.
This could be due to
- major life events: car accident, high jacking, death of a loved one, carreer promotion etc.
- Could be part of a gradual maturing and growth process that all individuals go through.
Based on these conflicting characteristics, different theories have been developed and subsequently used in marketing and consumer behaviour research.
These theories provide the structure for a review of a large body of evidence, all of which has implications for the analysis of customer behaviour.
Personality Theories
- Freud’s psycho- analytic theory
- Neo-Freudian theory
- Trait theory
- Gestalt theory
Freud’s psycho- analytic theory
Unconscious motives and repressed needs resulting in a non-empirical approach to personality.
The foundation of motivational research is that it operates on the premise that human drives are largely unconscious in nature and serve to motivate many customer actions.
Emphises in motivational research studies is on discovering the underlying motivations for specific consumer behaviour.
The motivational researcher, focusses on what the customer buy, and treat the purchase as a reflection and an extension of the customers personality.
- For example: The clothes that we wear or the images that we display reflects our personality. It suggests that using a particular produsct such as expensive jewellery, enhances our self confidence.
Neo-Freudian theory
Social relationships are fundamental to the formation of personality
It emphasise the fundamental role of social relationships, in the formation and developement of personality.
For example: A marketer who positions a product as being unique and non-conformists seem to be guided by the neo-fredian theory’s characterisations of “detached individual”- a person seeking independence and individuality
Trait theory
Personality is composed of a set of traits described by the general response to predispositions
A trait is any distinguishing, ralatively enduring way in which one individual differs from another.
The theory states that individuals posses innate psycological traits: self-confidence, aggresion, responsibility to a greater or lesser degree.
These traits can be measured by specially designed scales.
Trait theorists are concerned with the construction of personality tests to pinpoint individual differences in terms of specific personality traits.
- For Example: Individuals may distinguish other people as reserved or outgoing and then lable them intuitivly in terms of their traits.
Gestalt theory
Personality is an outcome of introducing a person to a total environment
People do not experience the numerous stimuli they select from the environment as seperate and discrete sensasions; rather they tend to organise them into groups and perceive them as unified wholes.
The perceived characteristics of even the simplest stimulus are veiwed as a function of the whole to which the stimulus appears to belong.
Attitudes, perceptions, aspirations, self-concept, sattisfaction, frustration and motivation are all necessary to explain and understand human personality and, therfore, a customer’s behaviour.
- For exmaple: The use of ordinary people in advertisemnets as the advertisments assume that customers better identify with people like themselves or personal selling and advertisements that emphasise social acceptance, or show people having fun.
Influence of Personality on Lifestyle
Marketers have found it difficult to segment the market using personality, which is why the focus has now shifted to lifestyle.
Lifestyle is defined as the way people live and interact within the environment or simply a person’s way of being and living in the world.
It is also described as a person’s pattern of living in the world as expressed through activities, interests and opinions.
- For example, if a consumer purchases a BMW car, it implies that the lifestyle of the particular consumer will automatically change in terms of self-confidence and the manner in which he conducts him- or herself in relation to colleagues and friends.
