Self-Concept

What is Self-Concept?

In this post I am going to give my definition of what I think Self-Concept is and theories relating to this particular topic.

According to me, Self-Concept is something which you create or think from your own experiences in life, as self means yourself and concept is something you think or create. you put the two together and and its something you do or think yourself. Below is a picture of different things circling around Self-Concept.

Coming to the theory side of Self-Concept, basically according to the theorist Solomon (1999) stated that Self-Concept is "the beliefs a person holds about his or her attributes and how they assess those qualities". An example for this could be that a teenage boy in his mid teens sees himself being a perfect person. This shows his own Self-Concept is positive. Each individual has separate beliefs on different aspects like emotional, and even physical about themselves. If you think about it, Self-Concept can be thought of as something of a future tense. Why I say that is because each person has ideas of what their aim is going to be in life and you only aim about life when you want to talk about future.

Self-Concept has three factors and they are:

1.) Self Image - Self Image is basically what we see ourselves like or percieve as. The picture below may look funny, but this shows that even an animal like a cat has ideas of seeing herself in the mirror even if it is pretentious and thinking of itself as a lion and thinking of being strong and powerful, even though they are part of the same cat family, but the size of the two makes the lion stronger.

2.) Self Esteem - Self Esteem is basically of how we accept ourselves or value ourselves to what extent. It has an involvement of us people having a positive or a negative thought of ourselves. A person can have a high esteem which means he or she may think positive all the time whereas if have a low esteem will mean he or she may think negative all the time. Below is a picture of a young boy and it suggests his thoughts based on his expression that he is very negative on what he does and this means he has a very low esteem (a very negative approach to whatever he does)

3.) Ideal Self - Ideal Self is what each individual wants to be. It is the type of person who has all the power, strengths and the integrity in total a very strong and positive person. To become ideal a person must have a positive and clear vision for future in which all the good things should be contained and no negative thoughts. An example can be that a child can look up to its parents and say that I want to be like them so that shows that their parents may have positve attributes about them thats why a child wants to be like them. Below is a picture of a family in which a little girl looks up to her parents so this can be thought of as a child looking up to her parents that when she grows up she will have all the positives from them.

I hope this post helped you lot in understanding the concept of Self Concept. Any comments on this post please feel free to comment.

Personality

Hey guys, I know I have come here after long time. The reason is I was not well. But coming to the point, I am going to post about what type of personality I have. I am going to compare myself to a Simpson's character. You guys might think why a Simpsons character? It is because in the lecture our lecturer Ruth had Simpsons characters on the lecture slide and each of them differ from one anothers personality. I took a Personality test and my result was ESFJ. I know most people don't know what it is, well it means that I am a very supportive person. The Simpson's character I resemble is that of Ned Flanders. Below im going to put a table which will give the description of the type of person I am and below the table is the picture of the very supportive Ned Flanders.

The Supporters (ESFJ) are warm hearted people who highly value their relationships. They also are customer focused (in the business world) with the ability to bring the best of people. The only drawback is that they are very self sacrificing and won't pay enough attention to their own needs.

I totally agree with that as I am exactly that, as I put my friends and people who are close to me first and then I think of my self, which when you think of it tells you that why I am a supporter.

According to the theory side of things the dictionary definition of Personality is " the complex of all the attributes such as behavioral, temperamental, emotional and mental which suggests that characterize a unique individual.

According to Solomon (1999), he stated that personality is a "person's uniqe make up which consistently influence the way a person will respond to their environment." In my personal opinion personality is something which is a mixture of your inner thoughts and feelings and the way you beave in the outer world and these three things makes a person's personality stand out and unique. In everyday life we come across so many different people (i.e. while going to work, school, on the bus, train, while walking on the streets) and each of them have their own unique and different style of personality.

The Picture above is of the two boxers, they may be in the same sport, but both their personalities look different. Going on height, the boxer on the left is taller than the boxer on the right (every one knows who the boxer on the right is known as Mike Tyson). But as its a famous saying that don't judge people on their appearance, its not necessary that the person who is taller will overpower the guy who is short in height, it depends on the strength as every one knows Mike Tyson is very strong and a great boxer, so the height may not be a question. If the boxer on the left is tall, Mike Tyson on the right has an aggresive feel to him like the muscles and the tattoos.
In business, understanding one's personality is really important, as even though people are different to one another in this world but every one has values and their own personal strengths and qualities, and so the marketeers should have a psychological edge over what kind of product to target to what customer depending on the type of personality they have.

One of the main theory on Personality is undertaken by Horney (1945), he talked about a common sense style about the development of neuortic character structure and interpersonal relationships. In simple language this translates to that his theory stated that personality is developed from the level of anxiety a dependent child feels. There are a lot of things which can result from this like Indifference amongst your ownself, Lack of Respect and Too Much of Admiration from Others.

Hollander is another important theorist who spoke about Personality. He stated that personality is "the sum total of an individual characteristic which makes him unique". In simpler words what he meant was that the best way you can understand someone's personality is by looking at the structure. What Hollander means by structuring is that it can be divided into three different but related to one another's levels.

One of the levels being the Psychological Core which has fairly permanent qualities including beliefs and values, second one being behaviour which is different at different times and in different situations and third one being is a typical response which affects the role of the related behaviour.


Trait is another theorist and the main theory for personality he has carried out is Cattel's Trait. He introduced a 16 factor model for personality. Below is an image of the 16 factor model:

Trait has introduced a 16 factor model of personality. This 16 factor model which has been identified, is now used in the Big Five model of personality. Cattell's 16 factor model would identify certain common traits which are considered to be possessed by all and some unique traits which are possessed by some people.

Hope this post on personality was usefull. Any feedback regarding this post, please feel free to comment.

Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning

Hello people, and welcome to yet another of my blogs. Today the topic is STP. You guys might think what is STP, well STP stands for Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning. These three are mostly used before any planning for marketing programs. This helps companies in differentiating their products what they are offering and from that the companies competitors are ensured that the same type of product gets the same market profile for it deserves. Below is a picture of an orange, but this orange gives us a lot to think about in the marketing world.

This picture of the orange symbolises the segmentation as three slices of the oranges represent three different products and how they are going to segment themselves in the market.

Instead of writing it in full I will use the short abbreviated form (STP). When companies do market research it is all part of STP. It uses information on the present size of market, the current shares of market, the potential customers, their purchases, their decision process, etc.

STP when come together consists of three stages. The first being the one in which one has to determine what kind of customers are there. The second one being where one has to select what customers are best to be served. The final stage being the one where the segmentation has to be done by the products or the service for the segment has to be optimized.

When talking about segmentation on its own, it basically has some factors, some people call it categories and these factors/categories consist of Age, Gender, Personality, Income (how much you earn), Social Class, Lifestyle, etc.

After Segmentation is done, the next step is Targeting. In this step the chosen segments by the companies for the product or service have to be developed for a strategy to be targeted to the particular target group/customers. After doing that, what is left for the company to do is the selection of the easier way of how to target their chosen customers.

Have covered Segmenting, covered Targeting, now its the turn of Positioning. Basically Positioning is all about the involvement of the way the companies target their customers. For example Microsoft is a company which positions itself in the IT market and when it comes to promoting its products or services it does it through all forms of media.

Below is a picture describing what each of the STP do.

This is all for this weeks post and on this topic, will be back with more postings soon. Till then please feel free to comment or give any suggestions for improvements.