Self-Concept and Self-Esteem

Self-Concept and Self-Esteem

• Self-concept is a person's complete understanding and evaluation of their own qualities and attributes.
• Core identities, social roles, values, beliefs, and experiences makeup personal attributes.
  • Some of these attributes are more stable, while others are more adaptable.
• Self-esteem results from self-evaluation of personal attributes, indicating how positively one views oneself.
• A consumer's self-esteem can be influenced by comparing themselves to an ideal.

Dimensions of Self

• The actual self represents a person's realistic appraisal of their qualities, influencing product choices that align with this self-perception.
• The ideal self reflects the person's aspirations, guiding product choices that help achieve this ideal.
• The avoidance self embodies the type of person one does not want to be.

Bridging the Actual and Ideal Selves

• Consumers improve their self-image by using self-altering products like clothing, cosmetics, and tattoos to modify their appearance.
• Expressing uniqueness involves creating a new self or adopting an appearance similar to someone the individual admires.
• Self-alteration is closely related to physical and achievement vanity.
  • Physical vanity involves excessive concern with one's physical appearance.
  • Achievement vanity involves excessive concern with one's personal achievements.
• Both types of vanity are closely related to Materialism. Personal care and beauty products are a lucrative market.

The Self and Others: Looking-Glass Self

• The looking-glass self is a self-concept formed through incorporating other people's views.
  • It is constructed by imagining how we appear to others, how others judge us, and developing feelings based on these perceptions.
• Social interactions shape self-identity and self-esteem through the looking-glass self.
  • An example would be a woman choosing professional attire based on her belief that others see her as a serious career woman.

The Self and Others: Social Comparison

• Social comparison means assessing one's opinions, abilities, appearance, and characteristics by comparing oneself to others.
• Downward social comparison involves comparing oneself to people worse off.
• Upward social comparison involves comparing oneself to people who are better off.
  • Exposure to advertisements often triggers purchases to enhance self-confidence.

The Self and Others: Public Self-Consciousness

• Public self-consciousness is the degree to which people consider external aspects of themselves, such as appearance and behavior, observable by others.
• Those higher in public self-consciousness show greater concern for the social appropriateness of their products and consumption, like clothing.
• High self-monitors are attuned to social cues and adapt how they present themselves in social environments.
  • This is seen in wearing clothes that align with the spirit of an event.

Body Image

• Body image is a consumer's subjective evaluation of their physical self and is a significant part of their self-concept.
• Ideals of beauty are partly due to marketing efforts that create a gap between actual and ideal selves to motivate purchase.
• Ideals are also based on universally appealing physical features suggesting youth and health.
  • This includes a symmetric face and, for females, large eyes, a narrow jaw, an hourglass figure, and fair skin.
  • Also for males, square jaws, distinct brow ridges, and a muscular build.
• An excessive obsession with body weight leads to weight-loss diets and surgery, and at the expense of health.

Expressing the Self: The Extended Self

• The extended self is the self augmented by possessions or attachments to external objects.
• There are four levels of the extended self:
  • Individual level: what you possess, like clothes or a car.
  • Family level: your residence and its furnishings.
  • Community level: your neighborhood and hometown.
  • Group level: social attachments, such as religion or employer.

Expressing the Self: Compensatory Consumption

• Compensatory consumption is consumers responding to threats to self-esteem by consuming products linked to the threatened aspect of their self-concept. Symbolic self-completion theory: people with an incomplete self-definition acquire and display symbols associated with their desired role.
  • An example is teenage boys using “macho” products like cars and cigarettes to bolster developing masculinity.
• As people mature into roles, they rely less on products to complete their identity and feel secure.

Expressing the Self: Anti-Consumption and Embodied Cognition

• Anti-consumption is the deliberate avoidance of purchasing or consuming products or services to signal personal values.
  • An example is refusing single-use plastics to reduce environmental waste.
• Embodied cognition is the theory that the human mind is determined by the human body and its interactions with the environment.
• States of the body can influence states of mind.
  • For example, power posing (adopting an expansive, upright posture) can boost confidence.
• Self-concept can be influenced by products and their meanings.
  • For example, feeling more competent using a major sports brand or becoming more attentive wearing a lab coat.

Expressing the Self: The Digital Self

• Digital selves represent our identity in online worlds.
• New virtual makeover technologies make involving one's digital self easier when choosing products to adorn physical selves.

Personality

• Personality refers to a person's specific psychological makeup and consistent behavioral influences.
• It demonstrates individual differences, consistency, and endurance and also changes with external factors and time.
• Marketers use strategies based on specific traits to target different consumer groups.
  • The message may be more product information than peripheral cues for those high on need for cognition.
• Marketers can predict and explain consumer behavior based on personality.
  • Though marketers can't change consumers' personalities, they may appeal to relevant traits of their target consumers.
• Personality can change as the result of life events and external situations.
  • For example, banks may rebrand as trustworthy and altruistic rather than aggressive after financial crises, as people could may become more cautious.

Freud on Consumer Behavior: Freudian Theory

• Sigmund Freud proposed that unconscious needs and drives, especially sexual and other biological drives, are at the heart of human motivation and personality.
• A person's personality derives from the conflict between the desire to gratify physical needs and the need to function as a responsible member of society.
• This conflict plays out in the three interacting personality systems: the id, superego, and ego.
  • The id represents primitive, impulsive drives for immediate satisfaction without regard for the means.
  • The superego is the expression of moral and ethical codes of conduct.
    • It checks that the individual satisfies needs in a socially acceptable way and restrains impulsive forces of the id.
  • The ego is the individual's conscious control to balance impulsive demands of the id and sociocultural constraints of the superego.

Freud on Consumer Behavior: Implications

• Consumers cannot always tell their true motivation, thus in-depth interviews are needed to understand consumers
• Products are taken not simply because of their tangible benefits but also their symbolic meanings
• Consumers channel their unacceptable desires into acceptable outlets when they use products that signify these underlying desires. The ego compromises between the demands of the id and the superego
• Symbolic consumption: Cigars, knives, and pencils symbolize the male sex organ whilst bags, pockets, and flower pots, the female genital.

Freud on Consumer Behavior: Dichter's Motivational Research

• Motives behind consumer decisions and products.
  • Power is related to sugary products and large breakfasts
  • Masculinity is related to coffee, heavy shoes, and toy guns
  • Eroticism is related to gloves (removable) Social acceptance is related to toys, soap, and honey
  • Individuality is related to foreign cars, vodka, perfume
  • Status is related to carpets; and Femininity to cakes and cookies.

Neo-Freudian Theory

• Neo-Freudian theories recognize the unconscious and de-emphasize on the instinctual and sexual.
• Karen Horney's interpersonal psychoanalytic theory focuses on child-parent relationships.
  • The desire to conquer feelings of anxiety is also key.
  • Three Interpersonal orientations: Compliant, Aggressive, and Detached.
• Compliant individuals move toward others, desiring to be loved and appreciated shown to prefer name-brand products.
• Aggressive individuals move against others by excelling.
  • This shows a preference for strong deodorants, symbolizing power and masculinity.
• Detached individuals move away from others and desire independence and an example is heavy tea rather than coffee indicating non-conforming needs.
• Marketers position products or services to meet; a) the affiliation need (compliant) b) dominance need (aggressive) c) independence need (detachment)

Trait Theory

• This theory focuses on personality's empirical measures through specific psychological characteristics.
• traits are derived the big 5 Personality:
  • Openness to experience, Conscientiousness, agreeableness, and neuroticism
• The myers-briggs indicator classifies people along introversion, sensing versus thinking versus perceiving.
• There are few single trait personality for consumer behavior studies.

Traits of consumer behavior

• Innovativeness: The degree of a consumer's willingness to adopt new products and services, with factors.
  • Functional ones such as being interested in performance.
  • Hedonic ones such as feeling gratified and social such as desire to be recognized by others cognitive.
  • The mental stimulation will be successful for innovation brand extensions in the long run.
• Need for uniqueness: the desire for differentness, relative for an enhancement social identity.
  • the trends for others will use new products or brands.
• Social character: on a range between inner and outer.
  • inner relies on standards innovation ads will preference character over product benefits, however.
• Other directed look from others is directed for add features.

Traits on Consumer Behavior

• Dogmatism regards to rigidity towards information conflicting belief, defensive and authoritative figures.
• Low dogmatic are open minded that innovative messages and product usage information
• Materialism: people see possession are essential to acquiring to more self centered or luxury products or fulfilment experiences with others
• Ethnocentrism is the by a products nationalistic themes.

Brand Personality

• Brand personification means giving human traits or characteristic to a brand
• The marketing efforts are tendency to attribute characteristics to non human features and feelings.
  • A strong positive is in brand preference with increase purchases intentions.
• American multinational has identified 5 dimension as:
  • Domestic, Honest, Genuine.

More on Brand Personality

• Brand personality is human-like and is characterized by its typical customer.
  • it's either inferred from their product (motorcycles are daring) or name (The Pricerite stores).
• Brands have a strong close relationship.
• Serves as brand-personality function to infuse traits with cultural meanings shaping uses throughout the brand.

Are We What We Buy?

• Self Image is when are attribute a product (Grubb & Hipp 86)
• functional will not apply for any specific products
• There is a chicken or the egg question to products already made.