Personality and Self Concept

Personality...

"A persons unique make up which consistently influences the way the person responds to his or her environment."

"Those inner psychological characteristics that both determine and reflect how a person responds to his or her environment." Schiffman and Kanuk (2004)

...has an external aspect (how someone interacts with someone else), an internal aspect (a combination of the person's values and attitudes), a dynamic aspect (how someone behaves when facing a new situation; social adjustments etc) and a consistent aspect (the person's characteristic style). Hollander

...is made up of an Id, an Ego and a Superego. The Id is the selfish part of the person, it is the part of you that wants to maximise your pleasure. The Superego is the part of you that is conscious of the society and it's rules. and the Ego is the part that mediates between the Id and the Superego, it is the part that creates a balance between the two opposites. Freud.

...develops from the level of anxiety felt at being a depedent child. Horney came up with 3 personality types dependent on the level of anxiety, these are; Compliant, Aggressive and Detached.

This image comes from Aaker's brand personality framework, his belief is that by choosing the category that most suits you, you can determine your main personality traits.

To take a test and discover your personality type, visit http://www.mypersonality.info/personality-types/

Self Concept...

"The beliefs a person holds about his or her own attributes and how he or she evaluates those qualities." Solomon (1999)

"People see themselves as they imagine others see them." Solomon (1999) This quote suggests the importance of people's personal belongings. The quote suggests that people can assess others through merely looking at their possessions. Therefore, when it comes to people buying a certain product, they may not only be thinking about whether they like it or not, they may also be thinking about what others may think of that product and what assumptions people may make about you from buying such a product.

"The individual as perceived by that individual in a socially determined frame of reference." Newcomb

...does not necessarily reflect reality. It may not matter what the actual facts about that person are, it is what the person believes that makes self concept. This can account for people that suffer with eating disorders such as anorexia and bulimia; the person may be morbidly skinny, but they see themselves as overweight.

The advert shown below is all about self concept.

...is derived from social comparisons with others. James (1980) This is why there has been such controversy in regards to the amount of extremely skinny models being advertised in magazines promoting beauty, leading to a rise in young women and more recently young men suffering from eating disorders. If you have nothing else to compare yourself to but an unrealistically beautiful model with no faults whatsoever, then your self concept and self esteem will be dramatically affected. This could be either in a positive or negative way, and this is why advertising is so important, not only for promoting a product, but also for shaping how its audience react.

The larger the gap between the ideal self and self image, the lower the self esteem. The further away you want to be from what you actually are, the unhappier you are likely to be, hence your self esteem being dramatically lower. Dove have created a campaign for real beauty. This is to try and boost women's self esteem that are dampened by the unrealistic airbrushed and digitally edited faces and bodies in the media used to advertise beauty.

http://www.warc.com/ArticleCenter/Default.asp?CType=A&AID=WORDSEARCH11154&Tab=A. This website link takes you to an article on an experiment that was undertaken to try and establish whether advertising creates insecurities and dissatisfaction with the self. Here is just one of the results found:

The majority of participants compared themselves with models in advertisements; comparisons were both general and specific. Most participants mentioned that their first reaction, when looking at advertising images, was to study the size of the model's body. Different models were envied for a variety of reasons such as their weight or height, their beauty or their age. Some younger respondents (aged 25-29) envied the models for their very thin figures:

'You look at the models and think...yeah, I'd like to be that thin...you think yes, I'm going to start that diet next week. It's like...you'd like to look like that.

By looking at this article, you can see just how much of an impact advertising can have on their target audience.