Profiling consumers the role of personal values in consumer preferences
Models of consumer choice often fail to explain why individual consumers are drawn towards different products. Yet, with the growing use of personalised marketing, an understanding of individual consumer motivations is increasingly relevant. Where research investigates the effect of psychometrics on consumer choice, the focus often lies on personality. However, the relationship between personality and consumer choice is notoriously spurious. In addition, consumer choice increasingly requires active decision making in today's rich product environment. Personality offers limited insights into drivers of such consumer decisions. Personal values may be a more suitable psychometric. Theoretical work on values indicates their relevance in decision making and behaviour. Values describe a person's underlying goals and ambitions, reflecting their core needs and drivers. This thesis explores whether values meaningfully explain why consumers prefer products at the category, product variant and brand level, and investigates the predictive strength of values in different consumer choice scenarios. It does so by examining purchase records, social media activity, and self report data to test a series of predictive, structural and group differences models. The thesis contributes an original conceptual and methodological framework for assessing the role of values in consumer behaviours. It further contributes a text based measure of values to ease application in consumer settings. Results suggest that: 1. Values are correlated with preference for product category (Chapter 4) 2. Individual differences in values significantly predict product choice in the supermarket (Chapter 5) 3. Individual differences in consumer brand affiliation predict values with moderate accuracy (Chapter 6) These findings contribute to a more comprehensive understanding of the role of values in consumer preference and their feasibility and usefulness for application in personalisation and consumer insight.