Marketing Responsible Drinking Behavior: Comparing the Effectiveness of Responsible Drinking Messages Tailored to Three Possible “Personality” Conceptualizations

Abstract

We investigated whether a thoroughly personalized message (tailored to a person's “Big Five” personality traits) or a message matched to an alternate form of self-schema (ideal self-schema) would be more influential than a self-schema matched message (that has been found to be effective) at marketing responsible drinking. We expected the more thoroughly personalized Big Five matched message to be more effective than the self-schema matched message. However, neither the Big Five message nor the ideal self-schema message was more effective than the actual self-schema message. Therefore, research examining self-schema matching should be pursued rather than more complex Big Five matching.

KEYWORDS:

• drinking
• Big Five
• message tailoring
• Internet
• self-schema

Notes

The construct validity of this measure was established in an independent study in which over 8,000 subjects easily selected the schema type that most overlapped with their own self-concept (Brock et al., 1990).