“I'm a Mac” versus “I'm a PC”: Personality Differences between Mac and PC Users in a College Sample

Abstract

One hundred eight college students who had purchased either a Mac or PC laptop computer completed measures of the Big Five personality traits, ratings of brand characteristics of Macs and PCs, measures of implicit attitudes toward these products, and determinants of brand choices. Big Five personality traits did not differentiate between Mac and PC owners. Students overall rated Macs higher on various product attributes (attractive style, cool, youthful, and exciting) and PCs higher on reasonable price and good for gaming. Brand owners rated their own brands higher on characteristics of reliability, good for homework, ease of use, good for Internet surfing, and good features. PC owners placed greater importance on cost as a determinant of brand choice, whereas Mac owners placed greater emphasis on style. Personality traits may have more nuanced effects on brand choices, as shown by relationships between Neuroticism and greater importance placed on cost and lesser importance placed on ease of use. Openness to Experience was associated with greater importance placed on reliability and lesser importance placed on style. Supporting the predictive validity of the Implicit Association Test (IAT) in predicting consumer preferences, Mac owners showed more favorable implicit attitudes and stronger implicit self‐identification with Macs than did PC owners. Implicit attitudes also predicted self‐reported ratings of various product characteristics.

Personifying Destinations: A Personal Values Approach

“…Through advertising, marketers intentionally imbue their brands with human characteristics (Allen, Ng, and Wilson 2002; Durgee and Veryzer 1996), including personality traits (Aaker 1997) and personal values (Torelli et al 2012). For example, in the Apple-sponsored “I’m a Mac and I’m a PC” advertising campaign, the Mac’s personality is represented as cool and youthful, whereas the PC’s personality is represented as old and conventional (Nevid and Pastva 2014). Destination marketers are also embracing this trend.…”

Brand Personification: Introduction and Overview

“…In this introduction, some interesting aspects of Apple's Get a Mac campaign have already been touched on. In the first article in this Special Issue, Jeff Nevid and Amy Pastva () further explore other interesting aspects and consequences of that campaign using a measure of implicit attitude with a sample of students who had previously purchased either an Apple‐branded computer or one or another variety of PC. Complementing the notion of consumer identification with personified characters, is the notion of consumer “relationships” with personified characters.…”

“…For example, one such new tool entails the evaluation of consumers’ implicit associations. As described by Nevid (; Nevid & Pastva, ) and many others, this approach has proven to be helpful in uncovering consumer attitudes and associations that consumers themselves are unable or unwilling to express by more traditional interview methods. It is our hope that this Special Issue will inspire future researchers, trained and skilled in the application of DQR, implicit association methodology, and related research methods, to advance knowledge and understanding of the place of brand personification in the marketing mix.…”

When opposites attract? Exploring the existence of complementarity in self‐brand congruence processes

“…This proposes that HP traits are organized into five higher order dimensions: extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, emotional stability, and openness (Costa & McCrae, ). Decades of empirical study confirm that the FFM is a very reliable HP measurement scale (Nevid & Pastva, ; Schmitt, Allik, McCrae, & Benet‐Martínez, ), and recent research also indicates that it can be meaningfully applied to explain BP structure (Huang et al., ). The current study therefore employed the FFM model to measure HP and BP.…”