10
Traits That Consumers Flaunt and Marketers Ignore
IF WE WERE all honest about these Central Six traits, then dating, socializing, and working would be much simpler. We could just have six numbers tattooed on our foreheads, representing our percentile scores on each of the traits. Speed dating could be even faster, as we could instantly reject potential mates who score too low or too high on the traits we care most about. Presidential debates could just be one-minute close-ups of each candidate’s trait percentiles, and we could immediately see which candidate is too stupid (or too smart?), or too high or low on each of the Big Five, for us to vote for him or her.
Unfortunately, such trait-score tattoos would be unreliable, as people would be naturally inclined to fake them. Consider the unreliability of bumper stickers as trait displays. Because our mental traits are hard to assess when we’re wrapped in sheet metal and tinted glass, as we saw earlier, drivers often decorate their cars with $4 trait displays called bumper stickers, in an attempt to reveal the driver’s soul on a three-by-ten-inch plastic-laminate strip. However, there is no way to guarantee that bumper stickers accurately reflect the driver’s true mental traits. Convenience-store clerks will sell you these things without even checking your scores on the one-minute BFI-10 personality inventory. You might have even shoplifted one of the high-conscientiousness or high-agreeableness examples. Economists have a special technical term for a signal that is so unreliable—they call it “cheap talk.” Bumper stickers are promises with no credibility, claims with no evidence. They may be amusing, but you would not choose a friend or lover solely on that basis.
So, instead of just displaying cheap-talk trait tattoos and bumper stickers, we buy and display costly products that we think will testify more reliably to our key traits. Many people spend tens of thousands of dollars and four years of hard study getting a prestigious university degree, which contains no more trait information than a two-hour IQ test. We pay huge interest on credit-card debt just to build up a good credit score, to credibly display our conscientiousness for the time when we need a mortgage. We spend profligately on mobile phones so we can gossip loudly in public to our friends and appear credibly extraverted. Some of us subscribe to Harper’s, Wired, or Prospect to display cosmopolitan cultural sophistication, also known as openness. Billions of others pray daily, attend church weekly, and support the costly priest caste to display their moral virtues—conscientiousness, agreeableness, conservatism.
What these products have in common is not just their up-front capital cost, but the difficulty of exploiting them properly if one lacks the right personality traits. Even if you do manage to fake your way into Cambridge University, you won’t be able to fake your essays, tutorials, class participation, and grades. Even if your income qualifies you for an American Express Platinum Card, your credit rating will drop if you don’t pay your bills conscientiously. Even if you subscribe to Prospect (Britain’s best intellectual magazine), you won’t be able to converse intelligently about its content if you are not open to new ideas. If you are an irritable, short-tempered psychopath, you will not be able to stand weekly church sermons and rituals that will test your limited patience and agreeableness to the breaking point.
Thus, some of the most socially important products cannot be bought and displayed with money alone, because we want to know a lot more about people than their wealth. Many of these products don’t even look like products in the traditional retail sense. A Cambridge degree, a good credit rating, a local reputation as a well-informed intellectual or a generous churchgoer—none of these can be bought in a shopping mall, although money is required for each. In the next four chapters, we’ll look at the four traits out of the Central Six that I consider most important for understanding consumer behavior: intelligence, openness, conscientiousness, and agreeableness. Stability and extraversion are also fascinating, but it would be tedious to analyze all the Central Six in equal detail. By the time you understand the first four in the coming chapters, you’ll probably get the idea.
How Car Choices Reveal the Central Six Traits
One of the most expensive ways that consumers try to display their Central Six traits is through their choice of car brands and features. At least at a semiconscious level, car buyers seek a match between their own personality traits and the apparent “brand personality” promoted in the carmaker’s advertising. They also tend to seek the features that seem most important given their aspirations and anxieties as shaped by their Central Six traits. The table below lists some car brands and features that seem associated with high and low levels of each of the Central Six. (These are just my own impressions and stereotypes; each entry is debatable and subject to many exceptions. As with most products, there seems to be no good data on which brand personalities or car features are actually associated with each of the Central Six.)
High Intelligence
• Favorite brands: Acura, Audi, BMW, Lexus, Infiniti, Smart Car, Subaru, Volkswagen
• Favorite features: maximum value, complex controls, reading lights, headroom, hard-to-pronounce brand name and/or model name
Low Intelligence
• Favorite brands: Cadillac, Chrysler, Dodge, Ford, GMC, Hummer
• Favorite features: large mass, low down payment, dealer financing, high size-to-reliability ratio
High Openness (Liberalism, Eccentricity)
• Favorite brands: Lotus, Mini, Scion, Subaru
• Favorite features: eccentric design, foreign origin, ground clearance, moonroof, popularity among youth
High Conscientiousness (Responsibility, Caution)
• Favorite brands: Acura, Honda, Lexus, Volvo, Toyota
• Favorite features: reliability, child-safety locks, antitheft alarm, daytime running lights, gas mileage
Low Openness (Traditionalism, Conservatism)
• Favorite brands: Buick, Lincoln, Oldsmobile, Range Rover, Rolls-Royce
• Favorite features: traditional design, domestic origin, popularity among the elderly and royalty
Low Conscientiousness (Impulsiveness, Recklessness)
• Favorite brands: Ferrari, Jeep, Mitsubishi, Pontiac
• Favorite features: cruise control, cup holders, high acceleration
High Agreeableness (Kindness, Gentleness, Altruism)
• Favorite brands: Acura, Daewoo, Geo, Kia, Saturn
• Favorite features: eco-friendly design, hybrid drive, payload to help friends move, smiley-looking front end
Low Agreeableness (High Aggressiveness, Dominance)
• Favorite brands: BMW, Hummer, Maserati, Mercedes, Nissan
• Favorite features: horsepower, torque, intimidating size, menacing design, leather seats, sneering front end
High Stability (High Happiness, Self-Esteem)
• Favorite brands: Acura, Porsche, Scion
• Favorite features: cheerful design, happy “vibes”
Low Stability (High Anxiety, Neuroticism, Worries)
• Favorite brands: Volkswagen, Volvo
• Favorite features: safety, airbags, antilock brakes, electronic stability control, extended warranty
High Extraversion
• Favorite brands: Aston Martin, BMW, Ferrari, Mini, Porsche
• Favorite features: convertible, high-wattage subwoofers, vanity plates, ski rack, product placement in James Bond movies
Low Extraversion
• Favorite brands: Acura, Hyundai, Lexus, Saab, Subaru, Volvo
• Favorite features: tinted windows, neutral paintwork, quiet interior
Despite the lack of quantitative evidence, some brands clearly strive to become associated with a certain Central Six trait. For example, Subaru sponsors the annual meeting of the American Academy for the Advancement of Science, so it pretty clearly seeks patronage from high-intelligence consumers.
Some of the brands seem associated with extremes of several traits—BMW, for example, seems to connote high intelligence, low agreeableness, high stability, and high extraversion. If only one-third of people are at these extremes for each of these four traits, and if the four traits are uncorrelated, then BMW is tacitly restricting its market segment to one-third to the fourth power, or one out of every eighty-one potential car buyers. Thus, a strong brand personality can allow the consumer to display a more distinctive trait signal, but it might limit a company’s market share. By contrast, if Oldsmobile is associated mainly with one trait’s extreme (being older than average, hence lower in openness), then it is restricted to only one out of three potential car-buyers.
Advertising the Central Six Through Music Preferences and Web Pages
In a few exceptional cases, product choices can function similarly to cheap-talk trait tattoos and bumper stickers. Music preferences, for example, seem to work as fairly reliable indicators of the Central Six traits. In some fascinating recent studies, personality psychologists Peter Rentfrow and Samuel Gosling have investigated how people’s Big Five traits are conveyed commonly, quickly, easily, and accurately by their stated music preferences. Previous research had already shown that personality traits and music preferences are genuinely correlated, and that people display their music preferences (in conversation, on personal websites, or on iPod playlists) to display their personality traits. Rentfrow and Gosling went further in analyzing the rich personality information conveyed by musical tastes. In one study, sixty college students were asked to get to know one another during a six-week period through an online chat system, and the researchers recorded the topics of their conversations. They found that music was by far the most common chat topic—more popular than discussing movies, books, TV shows, clothing, or sports.
In another Rentfrow and Gosling study, seventy-four college students completed a Big Five personality questionnaire and then listed their top-ten favorite songs. For each student, those songs were then recorded onto a CD that was heard by eight listeners, who judged each of that student’s Big Five traits. Correlations between listener judgments and student self-reports were significant for four of the Big Five traits: openness (+.47), extraversion (+.27), emotional stability (+.23), and agreeableness (+.21). (These correlations sound low, but they are impressive given that the listeners had no other information about the students they were judging: no photos or video, or information about age, sex, or race.) This accuracy was mediated by both the music genres preferred (emotionally stable students liked country music, at least if they were from Texas) and the specific acoustic features of the songs (extraverts liked music rated as containing a lot of energy, enthusiasm, and singing). Moreover, the personality information conveyed by music preferences nicely complemented that which can be discerned from photos or short video recordings of people (which are better at revealing conscientiousness and extraversion).
It also seems likely that music preferences reveal general intelligence. Conventional Top 40 radio stations, pop music, and easy-listening music are designed to maximize sales by appealing to the center of the bell curve. Alternative music and classical music basically connote higher-intelligence music—“difficult listening” music—which appeals to a smaller but more discerning market segment. It tends to be more complex with regard to melodic structure and scale, timbral richness and variety, rhythmic intricacy and variety, and lyrical vocabulary and allusiveness. This musical complexity requires more from the listener’s auditory perception, attention, and short-term memory, so listeners of lower intelligence find it overwhelming, stressful, and weird. So, higher intelligence can be displayed with some reliability through a stated preference for music by Bartók and Björk, rather than Lynyrd Skynyrd and Hannah Montana.
Thus, a MySpace profile containing nothing more than a face photo and a top-ten list of favorite songs allows reasonably accurate assessment of the Central Six traits, without the individual needing to buy or display any other products. A sneering goth girl who likes Rage Against the Machine, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson probably has low conscientiousness, low agreeableness, and low emotional stability. A smirking, well-groomed boy who likes Jars of Clay, Mercy Me, and Third Day (Christian rock groups) probably has the opposite traits. (Lock them together in a Winnebago and you’ve got an amusing reality TV show.)
How can music preferences as stated on social websites work reliably as trait displays, if trait tattoos and bumper stickers can’t? The key to their reliability is that others can easily call your bluff, by interrogating you about your allegedly favorite bands through e-mail and instant messaging. Suppose you claim to love Björk and start corresponding with other Björk fans on Facebook. If you don’t really know about her and her music, or have credible emotional and aesthetic responses to its godlike quirky-cosmic genius, other Björk fans will quickly discover your mendacity. You’ll lose all credibility if you can’t spell her last name (Gumundsdóttir) or opine that Vespertine was her most dance-able CD. As Central Six displays, music preferences stated on one’s Facebook site are much more reliable than bumper stickers glued to one’s car, because it is easier for others to check your bona fides by e-mailing your Facebook site than by getting you to pull over on a highway and talk about your beliefs, desires, and views concerning Icelandic vocalists. Further studies by psychologists Simine Vazine, Samuel Gosling, and others have confirmed that people can judge someone’s personality surprisingly accurately by looking at the content of his or her Web page.
Why Marketers Ignore the Central Six
Surprisingly, most marketers have no idea how well the Central Six can predict consumer behavior. The typical consumer behavior textbook includes a large section devoted to individual differences, but no discussion of general intelligence and the Big Five traits. Rather, the focus is on diverse “factors” that may influence consumer decision making: wealth, time, knowledge, attitudes, values, self-concepts, and motivations. The fact that the Central Six efficiently predict individual variation across all these factors remains unknown or ignored. General intelligence sometimes makes an appearance under the guise of “cognitive resources,” but this term is usually construed to mean individual differences in the ability to focus attention given current distractions. The fact that intelligence predicts wealth and knowledge is ignored, as is the fact that the Big Five traits predict attitudes, values, self-concepts, and motivations. Marketers likewise pay attention to “demographic variables”—age, sex, ethnicity, socioeconomic status—without taking into account their correlations with the Central Six.
A similar ignorance of the Central Six afflicts academic consumer-behavior research. The three leading journals—Journal of Marketing (JM), Journal of Marketing Research (JMR), and Journal of Consumer Research (JCR)—have published sixty-four hundred papers in total, of which only about sixty papers refer to personality at all, and only three of which refer to five-factor models of personality or to any of the specific Big Five traits. Individual differences in consumer intelligence get even less attention. Not a single JM, JMR, or JCR paper has ever mentioned general intelligence, the g factor, or IQ (one JCR paper in 1984 did mention “cognitive ability,” but rejected the idea of a general intelligence factor). References to traits, genetics, and heritability are equally rare. A handful of papers in these journals use costly signaling theory in discussing how companies can send signals about product quality to consumers, but none discuss how consumers can send signals about their own traits to other people. Further, JM, JMR, and JCR papers almost never mention conspicuous consumption, Veblen, social status, or positional goods (discussed below).
In a 2002 review paper, marketing professor Hans Baumgartner observed that:
Personality research has long been a fringe player in the study of consumer behavior. Little research is directly devoted to personality issues, and if consumer personality is investigated at all, it tends to be from the narrow perspective of developing yet another individual difference measure in an already crowded field of personality scales or considering the moderating effects of a given trait on some relationship of interest.
Basically, consumer research just isn’t keeping up to date with discoveries in personality psychology or recognizing how powerfully the Big Five traits influence consumer behavior and self-display.
Many consumer research papers assume that consumers simply prefer products that match their own “identities” or “self-schemata,” such that the “brand personality” is congruent with their “consumer personality.” The consumer’s desire for a product to fit with his personal identity is usually construed as a matter of “relationship quality” (the consumer relates to the brand as if it were a person in its own right) rather than a matter of strategic trait signaling (the consumer chooses the brand to reveal information about his own traits to other real people). By this account, highly agreeable consumers prefer highly agreeable products (those that appear gentle and kind) as a silly side effect of their social preferences for highly agreeable friends—not as a sensible, reliable way to display their agreeableness to others.
Some consumer researchers have recognized that consumers strive to “communicate desired identities” to others through their product choices, especially when the “identity salience” (trait-signaling power) of products is high. This insight is central to “consumer culture theory,” which emphasizes the social, cultural, symbolic, aesthetic, and ritualistic ways that consumers create and display their personal and collective identities through their product choices. Consumer culture theory usually entails qualitative observational research on consumer identities within particular markets, subcultures, and ideologies. However, this theory has some serious shortcomings from a scientific point of view: it is vague about the nature of individual consumer “identity” (the specific traits being displayed), murky about the actual function of displaying collective “identity” (class, age, sex, ethnicity), and hostile to evolutionary insights into human nature and social interaction. Also, consumer culture theory has not succeeded in finding common ground with the other main paradigms in consumer research: rational choice theory, cognitive psychology, experimental design, and quantitative analysis.
Part of the problem here is the artificial distinction between “utilitarian” goods (allegedly valued just for their practical utility, such as an axe), “hedonic” goods (valued just for their subjective pleasure, such as ice cream), and “positional” goods (valued just for their status-signaling power, such as diamond earrings). This distinction is treacherous, because, as we saw earlier, all branded products that are profitable to sell must include some elements of conspicuous waste, precision, and/or reputation. These elements inform the consumer’s knowledge that the product makes a good trait display, and become confounded with the consumer’s experience of pleasure in buying, using, and displaying the product. Also, the ostensible utility of a product is often conflated with its conspicuous precision and reputation. The concept of a positional good is fairly applicable to products as intelligence signals (since most people want to appear positioned higher rather than lower on the bell curve of IQ), but it applies less comfortably to products as signals of Big Five traits (where there is less consensus about which trait level is optimal).
So, most current research on marketing and consumer behavior relies on a chaotic grab bag of outdated theories and unreliable findings. The potent effects of general intelligence are hidden behind its causal effects, empirical correlates, and politically correct euphemisms: education, class, socioeconomic status, consumer knowledge, “cognitive resources,” and “cultural capital.” Often, marketers think they are studying the effects of class, race, or religion on consumer decision making when they are actually studying the effects of intelligence, which shows different average scores, for whatever reasons, across different classes, races, and religions. The potent effects of the Big Five are likewise hidden behind their correlates and euphemisms: attitudes, motivations, self-concept, values, lifestyle, culture. Here, marketers think they are studying the effects of sex, age, or political beliefs, when they are actually studying the effects of openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, stability, or extraversion, which also show different average scores across males and females, young and old, liberals and conservatives.
Such imprecise ways of trying to understand individual differences in consumer behavior are popular among marketing professors and consultants for two key reasons. First, acknowledging the Central Six would be politically incorrect, socially awkward, and downright embarrassing for marketers, who mostly think of themselves as the most liberal, progressive, creative people in the corporate world. Marketers are nevertheless surprisingly comfortable with stereotyping people by demographic group (age, sex, ethnicity, class, nationality), despite their political correctness. For instance, one recent consumer-behavior textbook claimed that “Germans are very ambitious, success oriented, and competitive”; “the French seek novelty and elegance”; “Chinese tend to be ethnocentric”; “in Mexico, deadlines are flexible”; “compared with Protestants and Catholics, Jews are more liberal and democratic, more flexible and rationalistic, higher in achievement motivation, more enthusiastic, gregarious, and emotional, more impatient and hurried, more inclined to postpone gratification, and politically most liberal.” Marketing is perhaps the last academic field in which blatant stereotyping by nation, religion, class, and sex is countenanced, as marketers can always claim that such groups just happen to have learned different values, norms, and cultures.
It would be much more awkward, socially and ideologically, for marketers to argue that demographic groups have different consumer preferences and behaviors because they have different distributions of psychological traits. Imagine if differences between Asian American and Anglo American consumer behavior could be explained entirely by the slightly higher average IQ of Asian Americans. Imagine if “gender role differences” in consumer behavior boiled down to sex differences in agreeableness. Imagine if some “cross-cultural differences” in consumer behavior boiled down to subtle cross-national differences in average openness or conscientiousness. If marketers simultaneously measured the Central Six traits and their usual demographic/cultural variables, and consistently found differences in trait averages and variances as a function of age, sex, race, class, religion, or nationality, it would be a public relations disaster. Such findings would violate the central intellectual taboo of modern American life—that one mustn’t talk about meaningful psychological differences between groups. If, even worse, they found that the Central Six predicted consumer behavior better than the usual demographic/cultural variables, it would cast doubt on the standard liberal blank-slate view that demography is destiny—that socialized identity as part of a collective group predicts human behavior better than individual heritable traits.
Also, group stereotyping (a.k.a. market segmentation) would become more challenging if marketers acknowledged the Central Six. Different groups’ and cultures’ consumption propensities would have to be represented as partly overlapping clusters in a six-dimensional space of continuously variable traits. Instead of making superficial generalizations, marketers would have to measure personality profiles across groups by using empirically reliable, valid instruments applied to representative population samples. This would admittedly be more expensive than gathering basic demographic data (age, sex, race, class)—but it would be much cheaper in the long run than misconceived product design and misguided marketing strategy.
Second, marketing would be a much simpler, more stable, more progressive field of human knowledge if it were based on simple, stable, progressive models of humans derived from up-to-date psychology research. But that would be a bad thing for business-school academics seeking tenure through highly citable innovations in consumer research, and for marketing consultants seeking clients for faddish new consumer personality tests and market segmentation techniques. Tying them down too closely to the massive empirical research and solid theory in intelligence research and personality research would leave little wiggle room for radical new books, videos, and training seminars.
As the science historian Thomas Kuhn pointed out, once a science finds a winning formula—a way of making predictable, cumulative progress—it achieves the status of a “paradigm.” When paradigms are chugging along happily, and normal science is being done, radical “paradigm shifts” become less likely to succeed. This is as it should be: the more we know about some domain, the less likely it is that a random new idea about the domain will be correct. The more complex the organism, the less likely it is that a random mutation will improve its fitness. The more complex the society, the less likely it is that a major political revolution will improve everyone’s welfare.
However, consumer researchers often profit from touting their latest hypotheses as radical paradigm shifts that can offer their consulting clients big advantages over rivals. In order to keep the merry-go-round of continual paradigm shifts dizzying the clients and spinning the money, any upstart theory that looks likely to yield a genuine, stable, unifying paradigm must be killed in its cradle, for the collective good of the consulting profession. This is the economic rationale for why marketing abhors well-established psychological constructs. More scientifically minded market researchers would no doubt welcome the opportunity to understand consumer preferences more deeply using the Central Six, perhaps combined with demographic information. However, because the concepts of general intelligence and the Big Five personality traits are already in the public domain, they can’t easily be turned into a patented new business model or other form of intellectual property, so they can’t lead to a start-up company that grows faddish and gets bought out.
There is also an intellectual reason for marketers to overlook the Central Six: well-established scientific theories get boring after a while. Indeed, this is a danger of attending too many meetings of the International Society for Intelligence Research: one hears talk after talk about how good old-fashioned measures of good old-fashioned general intelligence predict yet another aspect of human behavior better than any other construct. The same holds true at personality psychology conferences: most talks now identify how the Big Five, yet again, capture most of the human variation in behavior—including the variation that some exciting new measure claims to tap for the first time. Again and again, the Central Six show their reliability and validity in individual differences research—a situation that leaves serious psychologists a little bored, but mostly happy, because we know that we really are making cumulative scientific progress. On the other hand, the stable, ubiquitous power of the Central Six would drive most marketers nuts, because they wouldn’t see the individual glory or corporate competitive advantage in using the same methods to describe consumer variation that everybody else uses, or even the same ones they themselves used last year. They want something new and secret: the radical new way to chop the population into chunks that can be optimally targeted by new product lines and advertising campaigns. The Central Six offer no hope of that, because: they are each continuous normal distributions; they have been well understood by psychologists for twenty years; they can be measured with great reliability and validity by existing questionnaires; and they are common knowledge. They offer no excitement, only accuracy; no trendiness, only solidity.
In particular, marketers like to measure individual differences in very domain-specific ways that require arcane knowledge. They measure “individualism versus collectivism” and “abstract versus associative thinking style” to characterize cross-national differences. They measure “masculinity versus femininity” and “gender-role conformity” to characterize sex differences. They measure “strength of reference group influence” to characterize age differences. They measure internal versus external “locus of control” to characterize religious differences. These domain-specific dimensions make life deliciously complex. How dull it would be if we realized that “collectivism” and “strength of reference group” are basically conscientiousness, “abstract thinking style” is general intelligence, “internal locus of control” is quite similar to the surgency facet of extraversion, and “masculinity” often means little more than low agreeableness, low conscientiousness, and high stability.
You might think that individual marketers would want to build solid, accurate models of consumer preferences so that their firms could maximize sales and profits, but you’d be wrong. The social, sexual, and career incentives for individual marketers to be exciting, trendy, and cool are often poorly aligned with the financial interests of a firm’s shareholders. In fact, a leading economic theory of advertising suggests that the content of marketing and advertising is largely irrelevant. Rather, the costs that a corporation incurs through marketing are largely ways for the corporation to signal its financial strength to potential employees, investors, and rival corporations, rather than ways actually to attract customers. This theory of advertising as conspicuous corporate waste follows the same costly signaling logic we have encountered so often before. Insofar as it’s true, the real function of marketers is not to understand and influence customers, but to earn high salaries, make a lot of noise, and stay away from the assembly line.