WINTER 2008 / Volume 8 - Issue 2
 | Research shows connection between consumer behavior and personality development
BY CHRISTA SKILES
It’s the pinnacle of the holiday shopping season, and stress levels are high. For many, time is running short, budgets are tight and tempers are flaring as they embark once again upon this most wonderful time of the retail-spending year.
Two consumers venture out to their local shopping mall. One will closely follow a predetermined checklist and stay within a carefully planned budget, and the other will amass a wallet full of receipts well beyond the family’s financial means and face a new year filled with debilitating credit card debt.
What factors contribute to such differences in behavior? According to Dr. Paul J. Albanese, associate professor of marketing in Kent State’s College of Business Administration, the answer lies in the individuals’ contrasting levels of personality development.
In his book, The Personality Continuum and Consumer Behavior (http://personalitycontinuum.com), which encapsulates roughly 25 years of research on the subject, Albanese uses an interdisciplinary approach based in psychoanalytic object relations theory — a model in which the level of one’s personality development depends on the quality of his or her interpersonal relationships — in order to examine consumer shopping behavior. Ranging from highest to lowest, each category — normal, neurotic, primitive or psychotic — is qualitatively different and reflects a specific pattern of behavior.
Though he began his career as a trained economist, Albanese credits frustration with his original doctoral dissertation for inspiring him to branch out and explore other fields of study, including psychology and sociology. This became the hallmark of the integrative framework he provides in his personality continuum. “When I was a doctoral student in economics, like any economist, I learned the concept of the rational economic man, and I didn’t believe in it,” Albanese says. “So I spent quite a long time studying psychology trying to demonstrate that it was not a good conception.
And then I had to come full circle and realize that it was a very good conception — limited, but very good. The rational consumer, from an economic point of view, would have a normal level of personality development.”
For the most part, normal consumers are consistent and predictable. “People who are normal make plans, and they follow through on their plans. They’re people who get on with their lives,” Albanese says. “They’re people who, if they make a commitment to you, they’ll typically follow through. They have a lot of very good qualities as people, and as consumers.”
Neurotic individuals, on the other hand, are ambivalent, indecisive and inhibited by feelings of guilt. According to Albanese, “Normal consumers spend less than they earn and save for future purchases they cannot afford, while neurotic shoppers spend an excessive amount of time shopping, often not buying anything. People arrested at the neurotic level of personality development tend mainly to be a pain to themselves, while those arrested at the lower, primitive level are a pain to everyone around them.”
Under ordinary circumstances, neurotic shoppers may appear very similar to rational ones. “A person who is neurotic — which is actually a very high level of personality development — on really good days might seem as normal as anyone could be,” Albanese says. “On really bad days, they could actually regress to a lower level of personality development and return to earlier patterns of behavior.”
Albanese currently is working on a paper focusing on the darker side of consumer behavior, profiling compulsive buyers. He says much of the current literature confuses the true compulsive buyer, who is arrested at the primitive level of development, with someone at the psychotic level, who is personified in the extreme case by an individual with bipolar disorder.
“Compulsive buyers will go out and spend all the money they have and max out their credit cards. They do that periodically, in repetitive buying binges,” Albanese says. “But that’s very different from the manic episodes of someone with bipolar disorder. They could spend tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars in an afternoon, and then, at the end of it, they either require hospitalization or they’re sometimes incarcerated.”
What many marketers fail to understand is that not all consumers have achieved the normal level of personality development. “Typically when marketers do research, there’s an implicit assumption that everyone they’re using as research subjects is at the normal level, ” Albanese says. “And, unless they are at the normal level, their behavior might not be consistent,” causing the research to be flawed.
Another common mistake in market research is using a snapshot of behavior at one specific point in time in an effort to understand buyers. “If you’re looking at one point in time, just at the buying behavior, then there wouldn’t really be any difference that a marketer could observe between someone who has bipolar disorder, someone at the primitive level of personality development who is a true compulsive buyer or someone at the higher neurotic level who is inconsistent from time to time,” he says.
Ignoring these nuances could lead marketers to make incorrect assumptions about consumer motivation. According to Albanese, “Until you can see that there are qualitatively different patterns of behavior that represent these qualitatively different levels of personality development, I don’t think you can really understand what motivates the consumer.”
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