Personality-Based Engagement: An Examination of Personality and Message Factors on Consumer Responses to Social Media Advertisements

Abstract

Social media advertising has seen a growth in media messages customized to appeal to highly specific characteristics of an identified target. However, the psychological determinants of consumer responses to such media content remain under-researched. An experiment was conducted to investigate the effect that consumer personality traits, regulatory focus, and product appeal have on consumers’ response to social media advertising messages. Alternate versions of the advertising stimulus were created to manipulate regulatory focus cues (promotion vs. prevention) and product appeal (hedonic vs. utilitarian). Four of the Big Five personality traits—extraversion, conscientiousness, openness, and neuroticism—were examined to detect differences in consumer responses. Significant main effects exist for all personality traits and interaction effects were found between a subset of the personality traits analyzed with regulatory focus and product appeal, thus lending evidence for the robustness of the Big-Five as a useful framework for assessing individual differences in an audience’s response to social media advertising and message persuasion.

Keywords:

• Consumer responses
• personality traits
• persuasion
• product appeal
• regulatory focus
• social media advertisements