13: Personality
"Personality" is another tem that is often vaguely defined. We know a person has one, and that it is idiosyncratic, and that it has a strong influence on their buying behavior. But it's shrouded in mystery, and its source and function are not given much consideration in marketing - it's a variable, it simply exists, and we accept it as given with little understanding.
Personality is demonstrated in our behavior: the reason two people make different choices in the same situation is (rightly) ascribed to personality. It's assessed by our beliefs and attitudes, though the beliefs a subject will profess do not coincide with those he demonstrates in action.
In social animals, the differences in personality are functional: the success of the group or tribe requires certain members to act differently from others. Some will be leaders, others will be followers, some will be soldiers, some will be caregivers, and each behavior contributes to the group.
For example, it's been observed that some rats are more adventurous than others - and an adventurous mouse becomes an explorer that discovers a new source of food or water and leads others to it. This is necessary for the pack to survive. For the individual rat, it entails danger, as an adventurous rat risks being injured or killed while exploring - so it is good that some rats, but not all of the pack, have adventurous personalities.
The practical approach to personality when dealing with masses of people (organizational management and marketing) is generally been to classify people into a narrow range of specific "types" and attempt to develop tactics to position a brand to one or more of these types.
However, these attempts tend to be generalization, sorting out all of humanity into a small number of categories and presuming by inference that each member of a given group will behave and react in the same way. This is a primitive and insufficient consideration of personality, as evidenced by the poor results it has achieved.
What Is Personality?
Generally speaking, personality is understood to be a specific set of characteristics that are possessed by a person that influences their cognition, motivation, and behavior.
On the individual level, personality is understood as a tendency of a person toward certain moods and emotional reactions.
If we observe a person to be in a certain mood more often than other moods, we assume that mood to be their default or preferred state. An individual is considered to be excitable, fun-loving, pensive, irritable, etc. because this is the state in which we typically observe them.
Likewise, it we observe a person to tend to have a given reaction to stimulus regularly, we also ascribe this to personality. If a person chooses to investigate a loud noise or flee from it, it is considered to be their personality.
(EN: Also important is the notion of normality - the baseline against which personality is measured. A person who shows some aggression is only considered to have an "aggressive" personality if they display aggression more frequently than the observer thinks a normal person would - whether this norm is set by examining a group of people, or comparing the other person to oneself only.)
It Is Not Survival Of The Fittest, But Death To The Unfit
A but of a left turn: Darwin is often misconstrued as "the survival of the fittest" - implying that the strongest and fastest will survive where others perish. However, Darwin never said anything of the kind.
What he did say is that nature will weed out the unfit. While in the instance of predation, this means that the slower members of the herd will fall prey to predatory animals, it does not mean that only the fastest will survive. In a pack of 500 antelope, the slowest will be taken, and the other 499 will survive.
An amusing anecdote: on the African plain, the lion must be faster than the slowest antelope in the herd to survive. But the antelope need not be faster than the lion, just faster than the slowest antelope. (EN: The joke about two men faced with an angry bear, one stops to put on running shoes, the punch line being "I don't have to outrun the bear, I just have to outrun you.")
Neither is Darwin's theory applicable only to competition of one animal against another - in fact, this is a rare incident in nature. An animal doesn't need to be the best at finding water in order to survive - it merely needs to be able to find water. If it is incapable of finding water, it does not survive - and it's in that sense that it is deemed "unfit."
In pack or societal species, the survival of the group depends on the capabilities of all its members - if each were equally capable, there would be no benefit to social existence, as each could be autonomous. But where some are better at certain things than others, the group benefits from the specialized capability of those individuals.
Back to the example of the antelope -if the "fast runner" and "water finder" personalities are possessed by different members of the herd, the her itself will not survive. When the water-finders are killed by predators, the fast-runners die not from predation, but of thirst. Nature's solution to such a problem, to prevent extinction, might be to evolve a third group of "soldier" or "sacrificial" antelope - who fight off or give themselves to the predators so that the necessary members of the species, slow-running water finders, can survive.
Determinants of Personality
There is ongoing argument about the source of personality. Some argue that it is genetic, a person is born with a given personality and cannot deviate from it, while others argue that it is experiential, and that it is developed over time. Even some among he others believe that personality is "cast" by a certain age, while others believe it to be mutable throughout our lifetimes.
If we look to neuroscience, we must concede that there is some basis for genetics in personality due to variations in the structure and chemistry of the brain at birth. But except in cases where the brain is significantly damaged, experience plays a much stronger role in determining personality.
Experience accrues over time: the curiosity of youth derives from inexperience, and the desire to explore and develop experience. As we have experiences, we form memories and gestalts that color our perception of future experiences, even the unknown. These gestalts determine our mood, emotional reaction, and personality.
This is not to suggest that personality is voluntary choice, any more than our formation of memory is voluntary, or our initial emotional reaction is voluntary. We do not control the environment, do not choose stimuli, do not choose what emotions we experience at the time we are stimulated, etc. Much of this happens in the emotional and pre-logical mind. But neither is it the case that we are victims of circumstance. While we do not choose a stimulus or our reaction, we reflect upon the experience afterward, and are able to influence our future perception and reaction.
As such, we tend to fall into distinct patterns - and these idiosyncratic patterns are very much our "personality," a combination of our perceptions, our memories, our experiences, and our evaluation of all of these. The more that we determine that the outcome of a reaction was positive, the more likely we are to choose that same reaction in future.
Also, personality is more persistent than mood: a mood can come or go, but personality encompasses a set of moods that manifest themselves frequently and over longer periods of time. It also encompasses our default set of emotional reactions to stimuli. And it changes more slowly once it has been established.
What Does This Have To Do With Marketing?
Personality is of great interest to marketers: it determines how a specific person reacts, or can be expected to react, to a given stimulus. It is also the default state that a person has, into which any external stimulus (marketing message) will be received, and has a strong influence on how an individual will react. In effect, it is the "as is" situation that the marketer seeks to impact in a way that will cause the individual to form a positive impression of a brand.
Marketers consider personality in determining how to position their brands, managing their image to appeal to customers of a certain type of person - which is to say, a certain type of personality. Brands themselves are asid to have a personality, which mirrors, complements, or appeals to the personality of the consumer to which the brand is meant to appeal.
The author returns to the example of food: people become hungry in the same way, and the same hormones affect the hypothalamus - but he way in which they solve the problem, given alternatives, is based on their memories, derived from individual experience, and guided by emotions and memory to determine what food they would "like" to consume.
The food we eat, the clothes we wear, the can we drive, the bank we choose, all involve choices among a number of serviceable alternatives between which we make a deliberate decision, guided to some degree by logical evaluation of features, but guided primarily by our emotions - not random impulses, but generally (though not infallibly) consistent with our personality.
(EN: My sense is it goes further than that - in that whether we choose to utilize a product at all is dependent on the same factor. Some products are necessities - we all must eat - but the great majority are not - and before we face the choice of what brand of pocket watch to purchase, we choose whether to purchase a pocket watch at all.)
The problem is that personality is highly idiosyncratic, and the tools and systems by which psychologists and marketers consider and classify personalities are woefully primitive, generalizing all humanity into a small number of categories"
- Classical theory (Galen/Hippocrates) reduced men to four or five types
- Psychology (Jung) defines eight
- The VALS system provides eight
- Myers-Briggs uses four factors to create 16
- HEXACO (experimental, but gaining popularity in Europe) uses six factors with four subcategories - a base of 36 personality types
- "Pop" psychology often sorts people into as few as two to four
Naturally, a system that pigeon-holes people into a small number of categories is overlooking a great deal of complexity in personality and human behavior, and the general rebuttal is that personality is too complex to consider with much accuracy, and any tool that helps simplify matters, even if it oversimplifies matters to a point where precision is lost, is "better than nothing."
About Brand Personality
It has become "really common" for marketers to describe their brands as if they were people with personalities. A band is said to be friendly, trustworthy, reliable, and other adjectives that are drawn from human personalities.
The author acknowledges that studies into brand personality "yield statistically stable results" but that this "does not necessarily mean" that brands have personalities. In many interviews and focus groups, subjects seem a bit puzzled when asked to describe a brand in terms of its personality - they can be goaded into doing so, but it's clearly not their natural inclination.
So while marketers would like to anthropomorphize brands, an want customers to regard their brand as a trusted friend who has certain qualities of characters, consumers are not inclined to do so, and regard a brand as an object or an organization without a human face, soul, or personality.
Bio-Measures And Personality
While there is some speculation that personality would influence the EEG measurements, there is no reason to expect that it should. Because personality does not change in the short term, and it is not based on immediate sensation, the momentary fluctuations in the electrical activity of the brain may be influenced by personality, but are not indicative of it.
Neither is physiology a reliable metric for personality: the brain has been studied intently based on the assumption that its physical structure is altered by personality - that a given part of the brain will be larger or more wrinkled due to use - but there has been no significant and repeatable evidence that this is so. AS such, these studies are to be regarded as next of kin to phrenology.
In sum, science does not offer a metric that is reliable or accurate in assessing personality and measuring it - the best it can do simply is not good enough to be considered. As a result, we still depend on psychology and inference to get a vague sense of personality.