Personality and Consumer Behaviour: A Review

Abstract

The trust of this paper was to show the relevance of the development of the theories of personality to an understanding of consumer behaviour. The development and limitations of the psychodynamic theory, trait theory, behavioural theory, humanistic theory and the socio-cognitive theory were analyzed. The paper looked at the relevance of these theories to buying behaviour of consumers and examined some empirical studies that have established linkage between personality and consumer behaviour and some that failed to. The paper concludes that the theories are relevant to an understanding of the complex behaviour of consumers, information which have been successfully applied in development of marketing strategies. The paper also conclude that the low correlation between personality and consumer behaviour recorded by some researchers is due mainly to their failure to approach their studies outside the context of psychology from where the concept of personality was borrowed and also the problem of definition of the constructs.

Keywords: personality, consumer behaviour, psychodynamic, traits, behavioural, humanistic, socio-cognitive,