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Section 2 Internal Influences on Consumer Behavior
Chapter Summary
Now that you have finished reading this chapter, you should
understand why:
1. A consumer’s personality influences the way he or she
responds to marketing stimuli, but efforts to use this
information in marketing contexts meet with mixed results.
The concept of personality refers to a person’s unique psychological makeup and how it consistently influences
the way a person responds to his or her environment.
Marketing strategies based on personality differences have
met with mixed success, partly because of the way researchers have measured and applied these differences in
personality traits to consumption contexts. Some analysts
try to understand underlying differences in small samples
of consumers by employing techniques based on Freudian
psychology and variations of this perspective, whereas others have tried to assess these dimensions more objectively in
large samples using sophisticated, quantitative techniques
2. Brands have personalities.
A brand personality is the set of traits people attribute to a
product as if it were a person. Consumers assign personality qualities to all sorts of inanimate products. Like our
relationships with other people, these designations can
change over time; therefore, marketers need to be vigilant
about maintaining the brand personality they want consumers to perceive. Forging a desirable brand personality
often is key to building brand loyalty.
Copyright © 2017. Pearson Education Limited. All rights reserved.
3. A lifestyle defines a pattern of consumption that
reflects a person’s choices of how to spend his or her
time and money, and these choices are essential to
define consumer identity.
A consumer’s lifestyle refers to the ways he or she chooses
to spend time and money and how his or her consumption
choices reflect these values and tastes. Lifestyle research is
useful for tracking societal consumption preferences and
also for positioning specific products and services to different segments. Marketers segment based on lifestyle differences; they often group consumers in terms of their AIOs
(activities, interests, and opinions).
4. It can be more useful to identify patterns of consumption
than knowing about individual purchases when
organizations craft a lifestyle marketing strategy.
We associate interrelated sets of products and activities
with social roles to form consumption constellations. People
often purchase a product or service because they associate
it with a constellation that, in turn, they link to a lifestyle
they find desirable. Geodemography involves a set of techniques that use geographical and demographic data to
identify clusters of consumers with similar psychographic
characteristics.
5. Psychographics go beyond simple demographics to help
marketers understand and reach different consumer
segments.
Psychographic techniques classify consumers in terms
of psychological, subjective variables in addition to
observable characteristics (demographics). Marketers
have developed systems to identify consumer “types”
and to differentiate them in terms of their brand or
product preferences, media usage, leisure time activities, and attitudes toward broad issues such as politics
and religion.
6. Underlying values often drive consumer motivations.
Products take on meaning because a person thinks the
products will help him or her to achieve some goal that
is linked to a value, such as individuality or freedom. A
set of core values characterizes each culture, to which
most of its members adhere.
Key Terms
Acculturation, 268
AIOs, 264
Anthropomorphism, 253
Archetypes, 246
Belief system, 268
Big Five, 250
Brand arrogance,255
Brand personality, 253
Brand storytelling, 253
Co-branding strategies, 262
Consumption constellation, 262
Convention, 269
Core values, 268
Cosplay, 260
Crescive norms, 269
Custom, 269
Doppelgänger brand image, 256
Ego, 243
Enculturation, 268
E-sports, 258
Frugality, 249
Solomon, Michael R.. Consumer Behavior: Buying, Having, and Being, Global Edition, Pearson Education Limited, 2017. ProQuest Ebook Central,
http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/cpcepolyu-ebooks/detail.action?docID=5186164.
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