Hey guys the blog topic for today will be the concepts of consumer personalities and self concepts. personality is defined as the culmination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual’s distinctive character, in order for marketers to utilize this human characteristic in their strategies an understanding of the motivations and thought processes behind the customers personality traits such as extroversion, sensing, judging and by understanding these traits withing there consumer base can target advertisement in order to appeal to their psychological states. Self concepts are broadly speaking how the consumer perceives themselves and how they think others perceive them, in all there are five self concepts:
- Actual self image: the way a consumer perceives themselves
- Ideal self image: the way the consumer wishes to be perceived
- Social self image: how a consumer feels that others see them
- Ideal social self image: how a consumer wishes to be seen by others
- Expected self image: how the consumer expects to see themselves in the future
Every consumer is influenced by these five self concepts in some capacity when utilizing purchase decision processes and it is the marketers job to understand the contrast between their customer bases actual self image and their ideal self image which once known can allow the company to modify or produce products that can assist in the consumer reaching their ideal self image.
The most prominent example of using the understanding of a customers self concepts would be the beauty product market sector where years of social mental conditioning has been exposed to the world at large imprinting the “ideal” male and and female body features into the mass consumer creating and outlining clear differences between the actual self and ideal self of the potential customer. Once this distance between these self concept is established and understood beauty product companies then create products that appeal to the improvement of their customers appearance allowing them to decrease the metaphorical distance between the actual and ideal self concepts. This type of marketing is still using the simplest business of identifying a need and supplying it with a suitable product the difference is this strategy can be used in order to create the need at the detriment of the consumers actual self image which is viewed as a moral grey area and is constantly debated in the business world.
Now in regards to Nintendo using the self concepts in order to market their products, predominantly family friendly franchise games which would appeal to their consumers social self image especially since the majority of their consumer base is consisted of parents and young children and teenagers. The negative social pressure of buying your children violent video games is what aids in Nintendo’s strategies when targeting their consumers with their family friendly options allowing for entertainment at no social expense to their customers showing the usage of understanding the consumers social self image and how it can be used in relation to marketing their products.
References:
- Solomon, M, Russell-Bennett, R. and Previte, J, 2019, ‘Consumer Behaviour’, Australian Edition, 4th Ed., Pearson
- Agnes Garrett 2018, Body Image. 2 The Media Everyday we are hit with thousands of media images which show us the “ideal” male and female looks. However, very few people actually, https://slideplayer.com/slide/7634586/
- Jason Evangelho 2018,Why Is Nintendo’s Switch So Successful? It’s All About The Marketing, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2018/06/20/why-is-nintendos-switch-so-successful-its-all-about-the-marketing/#20f7b0a536c9
Consumers Today 