Measurement of the impact of the personality types against consumer sentiment towards marketing 1

The goal of this study is to measure if there is a relation between personality types, which are determined according to the Big Five scale, and consumer sentiment toward marketing and the severity and direction of this relation. After the literature review it was seen that there is not any studies about the measurement of the impact of the personality types against consumer sentiment toward marketing. Therefore, the research is important in terms of contributing to the literature. The research implemented with survey method to the applicants who were selected by using quota sampling and convenience sampling. Number of the valid surveys are 417. According to the results of the analysis it was seen that the personality types, which are coherent to the perception of the promotion activities, extroversive and open to experience, are all related positively. The compatible personality type has a positive impact on the perception of place and product activities. The conscientious personality type has also a positive impact on the perception of pricing activities. However, neurotic personality type does not have any impact on the consumer sentiment towards marketing.


Introduction
Consumers are affected by numerous internal and external factors when they make a decision.Personality is one of the internal factors which has an influence on behaviours.Personality is defined as the consistent reactions a person giving to different situations.Therefore it has an influence on consumers' perception of world and purchasing decisions (Deniz and Erciş, 2008: 302).It has been determined on the previous studies that personality has a leading role on consumers' product and brand preferences.In terms of marketing, personality types are critical factors on providing the right products and services, fulfilling consumer needs in a best way, market segmentation and target market selection (as cited in Deniz and Erciş, 2008: 302).
Perception is another internal factor that has an influence on consumer behaviour (Deniz and Erciş, 2008: 302).Perception is the process of selecting, organizing and interpreting the stimulators (Solomon, Bamossy and Askegaard, 2002: 36).This process is being affected by the one's attitudes, standard of judgments, motives, personality, the society he/she lives in etc. (Barlı, 2007: 121).Consumers perceive the marketing activities of businesses differently because of this internal factor that affects the consumers' behaviours.As long as the consumers' perception of marketing activities change, purchasing behaviours, which are the main purpose of the marketing activities, will change.For this reason, determination of consumer sentiment toward marketing and developing strategies in this direction are quite important.In this research, the relations between the personality types that shape people's purchasing behaviours and consumer sentiment toward marketing has been examined.

The subject, purpose and importance of the research
Concepts such as Personality, Personality Types, Big Five Scale, Consumer Sentiment toward Marketing have been defined in this research.Later on, in the light of the information gathered after the literature review, personality types and consumer sentiment toward marketing concepts have been operationalized.Survey implementation and analysis have performed to measure the relation between these two sides.The impact and the direction of the relation between these two variables are the main subject of this research.
The purpose of this study is to measure how consumers perceive marketing activities according to the personality types that are determined by Big Five Scale, whether there is a difference on consumer sentiment toward marketing depending on different personality types and whether these personality types have an impact on consumer sentiment toward marketing.According to the literature review it was seen that the impact of personality types on consumer sentiment toward marketing has not been examined.Therefore the contribution of the study to the academic literature is significant.Moreover, it is believed that the conclusions of the research will be useful for the businesses.

Personality
Personality can be defined as the characteristics that the individual has from his/her birth and learn by experience which will separate him/her form the others (Doğan, 2013: 57).McCare and Costa (1989) have described personality as a way of interaction that explains the individual's behaviours against different situations, continuous, interpersonal, emotional, motivational and based on experience.In another definition, it was mentioned as the behaviour characteristics which the individual shows around other people (Morgan, 1999: 311).Personality types appear as a result of the interaction of environmental factors (learned behaviour) and natural factors (psychological factors) (Çetin and Varoğlu, 2009).Numbers of theories were developed in order to explain what personality is in a more detailed way.Trait theory is the most frequently used in marketing and the most computable one with marketing methodology amongst the others.Trait theory approach aims to classify individuals according to their distinct characteristics.Trait theoreticians focus on the idiocratical personality characteristics that appear during the individual's psychological development process (www.notoku.com).
The Big Five Scale which was used in this study has been developed based on this theory.

Big Five scale
Explaining the personality in five dimensions has started in 1960 's, accelerated in 1980's and 1990's. In 1985 Costa and McCrae have determined that personality is consisted of five factors as a result of versatile measuremenet and scoring on a large composition of people by using behavior variables named as "factors" (as cited in Bolat, 2008: 91).In late 80's, personality psychologists have come to an understanding on the five strong factors of the Big Five Scale, which provided a useful and meaningful classification, in order to organize the complex findings in personality literature (Taggar, Hackett and Saha, 1999).Most of the researchers agree that most of the common characteristic approaches about personality might be contained by the Big Five Scale.They have named this five dimensioned approach as Big Five (as cited in Demirkan, 2006).
These dimensions are explained as below;

Extroversion
According to Watson and Clark (1997) extroverted individuals are also, tend to be exaggerate the situations they are involved, ambitious, passionate and dominant types (Trouba, 2007: 9).Regarding the researches made by Hurts and Donovan (2000), positive and significant relations were observed between the extroversion level of the individuals and their performances on their jobs (Moody, 2007: 26).

Conscientiousness
Digman and Takemoto-Chock (1981) mentioned that the qualifications such as Conscientiousness, honesty, reliability, attention, sedulousness are coming into prominence individuals with this personality trait.On the other hand, qualifications like irresponsibility, unreliableness, laziness, forgetfulness, self-indulgence and carelessness can be observed on the individuals with opposite habits (Church, 1993: 10).According to Goldberg (1990), the adjectives as sedulousness, reliability, seriousness that Conscientiousness dimension obtains, have a relation in a positive way with this dimension.The adjectives as forgetfulness, laziness, selfishness, on the contrary, have a negative relation with it (as cited in Develioğlu, 2013).

Agreeable
Individuals with this personality trait are more cooperative, gentler in social relations, affectionate, flexible, friendly, act in unison kind of people rather than competitive (Moody, 2007: 28).According to Lounsbury et. al. (2001), individuals, whose agreeable personality trait is more dominant, come into prominence with their helpful characteristics.People with lack of this personality trait are, opposite to the features mentioned above, generally objector, with a critical point of view, incompatible and arguer (as cited in Develioğlu, 2013)

Neuroticism
Neuroticism refers to the individual differences on the emotional stability and adaptation.People with high neuroticism are tend to have many emotions such as anxiety, hostility, depression, introversion, indiscretion and fragility (Costa and McCrae, 1989).People with low neuroticism are characterized as confident, calm, coldblooded and relaxed.

Openness to experience
Openness to experience personality dimension that is characterized as mentally curious, eager to explore new experiences and ideas.People who are more open to experiences are defined as innovative, creative, imaginative, considerate and non-traditionalist.On the other hand, people who are not open to experiences are described as traditionalist, non-analytical thinking, with narrow field of interest individuals (as cited in Çetin and Varoğlu, 2009).

Consumer sentiment toward marketing
Many researches have demanded to measure the consumer sentiment toward marketing and its related sides (Wee, 1989).Scales about perception of the marketing activities have been getting attention from the marketing scholars.The early entrepreneurs were mainly focused on consumer trust (Katona, 1963).This scale was designed to measure their tendencies on major expenses between a couple of months and more than one year periods.These indexes are still being used by the predictors as a sign of economic welfare.In 1970's scale developers had a progress in focusing on how consumers feel about marketing.This progress could be seen obviously on the studies of organizations such as Yankelovich Organization from Michigan University, where more complex scales that enable to observe the attitudes about specific institutions in the market, are being developed (Gaski and Etzel, 1986).
Three researchers (Barksdale & Darden 1972, Barksdale, Darden and Perrault 1976, and Barksdale and Perrault 1980) have developed and implemented a scale that aims to calculate the perception of the marketing activities.The main reason of this change was the increasing level of public criticism on the expectations about marketing practices in the United States.Increasing awareness of the consumer problems -especially after the last periods of 1950's -has ended up with marketing practices getting insistently criticized (as cited in Lawson, 2001).
Noticing the significant influence of macro-economic, socio-cultural and legal-politic factors on consumer behavior caused researchers to do comparative studies.Whit these researches drew attention to the lack of protection of the consumers' needs in developing countries.Not only the marketing researchers but also the marketing performers, business owners and international companies are attracted by understanding the needs of the consumers in other countries and their attitudes towards various marketing activities (Wee, 1989).Scientists such as Drucker have supported the necessities of marketing by making consumer protecting definitions like marketing's shame (Kotler, 1972).
The scale that was developed used the five global question sets which circles different marketing practices.Gaski and Etzel proposed a new scale that is more effective and credible, in order to measure the consumer perception.Despite the fact that there was 7 statements in each component of the marketing mix, the number of these statements were decreased to 5 in each component according to the reliability analysis performed (as cited in Lawson, 2001).
In this study, 5 statement Gaski and Etzel scale was used.

Method of the research
Population of the research is consisted of the people in Turkey who are over 18 years of age.Quota sampling and convenience sampling methods were used together during the sampling process.64 Likert statements were asked to the participants aside from the demographical statements.Survey was implemented to 417 participants who were determined by convenience sampling within Sakarya city borders in March and April 2015.In order to increase the strength of the sample, closer numbers to the population distribution in Turkey, were tried to be reached as gender and age.According to the results of the analysis; it was seen that only agreeable personality trait has a meaningful relation with the perception of product activities (p< 0,05) and personality traits explain the 3,7 % (R2=,037) of the changes on the perception of the product activities.According to the results of the analysis; it was seen that only conscientious personality trait has a meaningful relation with the perception of price activities (p< 0,05) and personality traits explain the 4,3 % (R 2 =,043) of the changes on the perception of the price activities.According to the results of the analysis; it was seen that only agreeable, extravert and open to experience personality trait has a meaningful relation with the perception of promotion activities (p< 0,05) and personality traits explain the 8 % (R 2 =,080) of the changes on the perception of the promotion activities.According to the results of the analysis; it was seen that only agreeable personality trait has a meaningful relation with the perception of place activities (p< 0,05) and personality traits explain the 6,6 % (R 2 =,066) of the changes on the perception of the place activities.

Findings of the research
As a conclusion of the regression analysis, it was seen that there are meaningful relations between; agreeable personality trait and the Perception of Place, Promotion and Product Activities variables; Extravert personality trait and the Perception of Promotion Activities variable; Conscientious personality trait and the Perception of Price Activities variable.

Conclusion and recommendations
Regarding the results of the study it was seen that the perception of promotion activities was the one which is influenced most by the personality traits amongst the perception of marketing activities.Agreeable, extravert and open to experience personality traits have a positive effect on the perception of promotion activities.The perception of promotion activities increases in a positive way, as these personality traits increase on consumers.
It was observed that agreeable personality trait has a positive effect on the perceptions of both place and product activities, which means the perception of these activities will increase as the agreeable personality trait increases on consumers.Conscientious personality trait is the one that has an influence on the perception of price activities.It can be concluded that consumers with conscientious personality traits have higher perception on price activities.Hence, price sensibility of the consumers with conscientious personality trait is high and they do not ignore the price because of the promotion activities.
Neurotic personality trait has no influence on the perception of any of the marketing activities, which lets us to conclude that the consumers with this personality trait ignore marketing activities and have low perception on them.Measuring the influence of the personality traits on the perception of marketing activities will not only contribute to the marketing literature in an academic scale, but also provide businesses valuable outputs which can be used in order to build the marketing activities.
Such that, businesses are beyond implementing marketing activities for segmented markets and are able to develop marketing activities for each consumer with the help of the information gained about them by using the ongoing developing technology.In order to make the marketing conditions improve that way, the relations and the directions of these relations that were shown in this study are suitable to use to develop personal marketing activities.

Figure 1 .
Figure 1.Model of the Research

Table 2 .
Reliability analysis results of the scales

Table 3 .
Regression analysis between personality traits and the perception of product activities variable

Table 4 .
Regression analysis between personality traits and the perception of price activities variable

Table 5 .
Regression analysis between personality traits and the perception of promotion activities variable

Table 6 .
Regression analysis between personality traits and the perception of place activities variable