Theories Of Personality

A personality is a combined form of characteristics that form an individual’s distinctive character. Your personality is not just what defines you, but how you define your outlook on life and your attitudes towards the outside world. It is essentially what makes you, you. Not only is personality exclusive to humans, in society we are increasingly seeing brands taking on this personified role. Brand personality speaks to our consumer needs and allows us to engage in relationship with the brand. Personality fascinates us, from reading our daily horoscopes to doing online tests to see what category of personality we fall into.

Throughout this paper I will discuss the following topics

What is personality?

Theories of Personality

Brand personality

The most common of these personality types is the Myers-Briggs personality test. This was formulated by Isabel Briggs Myers and Katharine Cook Briggs. This mother and daughter duo became increasing interested in the typological theories of psychiatrist Carl Yung. They evolved Yung’s theories on coming up with a being able to summarize an individual 's personality based on 16 personality types. (Pittenger, 1993)

These types are derived from 4 features of personality and their opposites

Extrovert versus Introvert

Sensing versus Intuition

Think versus feeling

Judgement versus perception

From a series of questions your personality type is achieved. (see appendix for diagram)

This personality test has been proven to be fiercely successful in the working world with world renowned companies like Google and Heineken using these theories and adapting them to enable a seamless working environment.

“The merit of theory presented here is that it enables us to expect specific personality differences in particular people and to cope with the people in a constructive way. Briefly the theory is that much seemly chance variation in human behaviour is not due to chance; it is in fact the logical result of a few basic observational differences in mental functioning. (I Myers 1980, p.1)

Although proving successful, it is not without critique from some

In an article published by Jennifer L. Laarker (1997) she discusses the importance of brand personality to the consumer. Brands increasingly give their product humanlike attributes in order to appeal to their target audience. Some brands have “product related attributes” and these have a solely utilitarian function whereas brand personality speaks to the consumer on another level concluding that the consumer buys this brand because it sees similar attributes of her/himself in the brand. Brand personality which is favourable and strong will strengthen the brand. Laarker (1997) goes on to discuss that Coca cola are cool, authentic and all american which the consumers of this brand would, unconsciously aspire to be.

We see Brand personality coming more to the forefront in our own media industries. The radio station logos I analysed were Spin 1038 and RTE. Spin 1038 is a station aimed at 18-30 year olds and this is can be seen through their imagery. The main colours are pink and black and convey the personified themes of being cool and trendy. On the other side of the spectrum we have RTE who through their imagery use the serene colours blue and green which suggest a calmer