What is Characteristic Adaptations

Approaches that attempt to predict consumer behavior have come a long way since the inception of socio-demographic profiling. This development is, on the one hand, driven by the desire of businesses to perform better and connect better with consumers. On the other hand, this is also driven by consumers who are explicitly seeking personalized guidance in a crowded marketplace and implicitly, nonconsciously, seeking to fulfill underlying emotional needs and goals by consuming brands and products. The author proposes a biopsychological framework to understand personality based on evolutionary studies of primal emotion systems and explains how this framework can predict preferences and behavioral tendencies in consumers. To ascertain the validity of the theory, four experiments were conducted to test and confirm personality-specific predictions regarding the effectiveness of personalized advertising campaigns, product choices, and brand preference.