Personality and Innovation Proneness.

Attempts at relating personality variables to consumer behavior have generally been disappointing [1, 2, 3, 4, 9, 10, 13, 14, 16, 17, 20, 29, 31]. Robertson and Myers [24, p. 167] concluded "that at best personality variables, as measured by a standardized, normative, self-designating personality inventory, have little, if any, relationship to innovative behavior." However, acceptance of the conclusion that personality variables have little, if any, explanatory value or predictive utility with respect to consumer behavior would be without justification. Investigators in the typical study of this relationship usually administer a broad-coverage personality inventory and attempt to correlate responses with statements of product use or preference. However, in most cases, no a priori thought is directed to how, or especially why, personality should or should not be related to given aspects of consumer behavior. Moreover, most of the studies which report statistically significant findings usually do so on the basis of post-hoc picking and choosing out of large data arrays [4, 17, 18, 29]. In conclusion, low dogmatic individuals were found to be significantly more likely to be innovators than high dogmatic individuals. To the extent that such innovators are also more likely to prefer objective information, advertisers seeking a market position for an innovation ought to focus on factual information rather than on irrelevancies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]