Toward a personology of the consumer

Personality research has long been a fringe player in the study of consumer behavior. Little research is directly devoted to personality issues, and if consumer personality is investigated at all, it tends to be from the narrow perspective of developing yet another individual difference measure in an already crowded field of personality scales or considering the moderating effects of a given trait on some relationship of interest. Understanding the individual person in his or her role as a consumer should be a key issue in the study of consumer behavior, but in order to realize this vision the scope of personality research has to be broadened. In this essay I discuss recent work in personality psychology that may serve as the foundation for the development of a personology of the consumer, in which people are seen as dispositional, goal-striving, and narrative entities engaged in consumption in the broadest sense.