Personal Factors
Personal characteristics that influence a buyer’s decision include age and stage in the life cycle, occupation and economic circumstances, personality and self-concept, and lifestyle and values.
Age and Stage in the Life Cycle Our taste in food, clothes, furniture, and recreation is often related to our age. Consumption is also shaped by the family life cycle and the number, age, and gender of people in the household at any point in time. In addition, psychological life-cycle stages may matter. Adults experience certain passages or transformations as they go through life.15 Their behavior during these intervals, such as when becoming a parent, is not necessarily fixed but changes with the times. Marketers should also consider critical life events or transitions—marriage, childbirth, illness, relocation, divorce, first job, career change, retirement, death of a spouse—as giving rise to new needs.
Occupation and Economic Circumstances Occupation influences consumption patterns. Marketers try to identify the occupational groups that have above-average interest in their products and services and even tailor products for certain occupational groups: Software companies, for example, design different products for engineers, lawyers, and physicians. Both product and brand choice are greatly affected by economic circumstances like spendable income (level, stability, and pattern over time), savings and assets (including the percentage that is liquid), debts, borrowing power, and attitudes toward spending and saving.
Personality and Self-Concept By personality, we mean a set of distinguishing human psychological traits that lead to relatively consistent and enduring responses to environmental stimuli including buying behavior. We often describe personality in terms of such traits as selfconfidence, dominance, autonomy, deference, sociability, defensiveness, and adaptability.16
Brands also have personalities, and consumers are likely to choose brands whose personalities match their own. We define brand personality as the specific mix of human traits that we can attribute to a particular brand. Stanford’s Jennifer Aaker researched brand personalities and identified the following traits: sincerity, excitement, competence, sophistication, and ruggedness.17 Cross-cultural studies have found that some but not all of these traits apply outside the United States.18
Consumers often choose and use brands with a brand personality consistent with their actual self-concept (how we view ourselves), though the match may instead be based on the consumer’s ideal self-concept (how we would like to view ourselves) or even on others’ self-concept (how we think others see us).19 These effects may also be more pronounced for publicly consumed products than for privately consumed goods.20 On the other hand, consumers who are high “self-monitors”—that is, sensitive to the way others see them—are more likely to choose brands whose personalities fit the consumption situation.21 Finally, multiple aspects of self (serious professional, caring family member, active fun-lover) may often be evoked differently in different situations or around different types of people.
Lifestyle and Values People from the same subculture, social class, and occupation may adopt quite different lifestyles. A lifestyle is a person’s pattern of living in the world as expressed in activities, interests, and opinions. It portrays the “whole person” interacting with his or her environment. Marketers search for relationships between their products and lifestyle groups. A computer manufacturer might find that most computer buyers are achievement-oriented and then aim the brand more clearly at the achiever lifestyle.
Lifestyles are shaped partly by whether consumers are money constrained or time constrained. Companies aiming to serve the money-constrained will create lower-cost products and services. By appealing to thrifty consumers, Walmart has become the largest company in the world. In some categories, notably food processing, companies targeting time-constrained consumers need to be aware that these very same people want to believe they’re not operating within time constraints. Marketers call those who seek both convenience and some involvement in the cooking process the “convenience involvement segment.”22
Consumer decisions are also influenced by core values, the belief systems that underlie attitudes and behaviors. Core values go much deeper than behavior or attitude and at a basic level guide people’s choices and desires over the long term. Marketers who target consumers on the basis of their values believe that with appeals to people’s inner selves, it is possible to influence their outer selves—their purchase behavior.
