Application of Personality Theories for the Design and Development of Cross-cultural Decision-making Tools

Abstract

The marketing domain requires the application of techniques from an array of disciplines (e.g., psychology, sociology, statistics) to understand information's impact on target market segment behavior in diverse socio-cultural conditions. Fundamentally, marketing operations require personnel to be social scientists, regional experts, and persuasive brand advocates and may operate in unfamiliar cultural environments with limited resources and rapid production times. These factors all contribute to the difficulties marketeers face with efficiently and effectively transposing themselves into a target market segment's mental state to understand their motivations and behavioral rationales—two characteristics which must be thoroughly explored to elicit long-term behavior change. To support increased cross-cultural competence among marketeers, we identified effective applications of personality psychology in the marketing domain and reviewed these methods to design a persuasive appeal support tool (PAST) based on analysis of the Five Factor Model (FFM) and other personality trait theories. PAST enables analysis of target market segments (TMSs) with regard to cultural impacts on their decision making based on social science theories of personality across cultures. We focused on informing audience-specific messaging using the FFM's generalizability across varying cultures, including rural, non-Western societies where the components of the Big Five traits are still applicable in slightly different mappings. Identifying these mappings enables users to relate a culture's FFM traits to their own, increasing marketeer empathy for, and understanding of, potential decision similarities and differences across a variety of cultural environments. This paper describes our approach leveraging social science theories of personality and differences in decision making across cultures to design and develop a tool to increase personnel's cross-cultural competence when developing messages that inform and influence target market segment decision making.