Högskolan i Skövde

The purpose of the study was to find out if different personality types were more interested in the implicit or explicit function of a product. Personality theory self-monitoring was chosen because we live in a self-monitoring society, which makes this theory relevant. In this study, "implicit function" is defined as abstract characteristics in terms of identity creation and heightened self-esteem. Explicit function is defined as concrete characteristics of a product, such as basic function a product satisfies. We therefore bound ourselves to Luxury Fashion (implicit) and Fast Fashion (explicit) to see if the outcome of a buying process could be explained depending on the degree to which an individual monitored his behaviour in social contexts. A combination of convenience and snowball sampling was combined to identify two different types of individuals who were opposed to the monitoring of their own behaviour (someone with high and low self-monitoring), because these later would forward us to similar people and the material was collected through interviews. The study found that individuals who monitored their behaviours largely in social contexts were more interested in the implicit function of clothing (Luxury Fashion), while individuals with low self-monitoring were interested in the explicit function of clothing (Fast Fashion). The reason for this was that these different types of consumers had different needs for social acceptance, the greater this need was it resulted in branded clothes and the lower the need was it resulted in cheaper clothes. In other words, consumers with high social acceptance requirements were more likely to trade brand clothing to achieve social acceptance. In this way we discovered what different personality types have for purchasing motives when shopping.