The Ways in which Personality Traits Affect the Buying Patterns of Individuals

One of the priorities of The Cocktail Analysis is to explore new ways of understanding consumer realities and their behavior. We like to think of ourselves as non-conformists, and we believe in the importance of researching the consumer from new approaches and perspectives that allow us to always go one step further.

With this idea in mind, we conducted a pioneering study in Spain whereby we analyze the relationship between personality traits and consumption patterns. We believe that the approach from the perspective of the Psychology of Personality has been -until now- neglected (or at least underestimated), by a large part of the market research industry, and this is, to say the least, striking, given the importance and the weight that this branch carries within Psychology, and how understanding stable consumer traits can help us to define value propositions for them. Therefore, we at The Cocktail Analysis want to mark the beginning of Personality Research as a new tool for understanding the consumer.

The report, titled, “The Impact of Personality on Consumer Buying,” began with the curiosity to validate a working hypothesis: that personality traits have a predictive value on certain buying patterns. In order to do so, we based our work on the most widely used theoretical framework in this field: the “Big Five Theory.” According to this framework, there are five fundamental factors that define personality: openness to experiences, extroversion, neuroticism, agreeableness and conscientiousness.

In the study, we analyzed personality profiles based on consumption data from The Cocktail Analysis Observatory on Consumer Trends and Vital Customer Satisfaction. After the analysis, we discovered ties among various personality types and certain consumer habits in Spain:

- Extroversion is relevant for making recommendations (and it’s directly related to NPS data).

- Being open to new experiences is significant in emerging consumption patterns (organic products, car sharing, etc.).

- Agreeableness is meaningful in the banking and insurance sectors (low agreeability predicts an increase in sales of some financial products).

- We believe that the brands that best understand these connections will be able to: segment their customers in an innovative way, significantly improve targeting and tailor offers and experiences based on personality profiles.

You can access the report here: