The area of marketing that small hospitality businesses often struggle with is consumer psychology. We observe our audience through their buying behaviors to understand their purchase decisions, but it seems impossible to predict what they’ll do. It seems clear that the goal is to understand how to influence customer behavior and the truth is, you can’t — but you can try your best to understand what influences it.

Understanding consumer behavior has many, many benefits. An understanding of how your customers feel and what they want from your company is important to ensure the connection between the two of you is solid. Without that solid connection, you risk miscommunicating your offerings, and a consumer risks identifying what they are explicitly looking for. Developing this understanding mostly comes from experience, but you can also work backward to see the underlying factors.

There are many of these factors that can influence consumer behavior: households, personal needs, safety needs, attitude, and many more. I’ll highlight two very important factors impacting the behaviors of hospitality consumers both externally and internally: culture and personality.

How Culture Affects Consumer Behavior

One of the factors influencing consumer behavior is culture. Before getting into how culture affects consumer purchase decisions, we need to take a look at an important concept — values.

We all have values, and we all have the same values. The difference between you, me, and every other individual is the weight of each of these values. But, what are values? Some examples of values may be happiness, adventure, luxury, or financial stability. We all value financial stability to some extent but a hypothetical difference may be that you are willing to sacrifice financial stability because you value luxury, whereas I would not sacrifice financial stability because I value it much more than luxury.

How do these values tie into culture and its impacts on consumer behavior? Our values are rooted in our culture and upbringing, and those external environments that we are a part of are a big part of our lifetime of decision-making. Understanding the values that certain cultures and upbringings generally associate with can help you discover more about your target market. Now, an important thing is that these assumptions are just guidelines and a basis of observation — you should be sure to recognize any stereotyping behaviors to avoid offending anyone.

Using someone’s culture and values to predict their behaviors can be a beneficial way to keep guests happy. Understanding cultures, in the hospitality industry especially, could be the difference between a three-star and five-star review. Here are some healthy ways you can understand cultures and develop your understanding of their impacts on consumer behavior:

• Socialize and ask questions about people’s upbringing with an open mind

• Try different foods in ethnic restaurants

• Read, or watch films, about different cultures

• Travel to unique places and talk to locals

How Personality Affects Consumer Behavior

These external forces of culture may then translate into internal forces. Your guests are all individual people, and you can’t rely on just the culture they were raised in as a sole advisor to their preferences. Understanding their personalities can help you further understand their behavior and help you tailor more personalized experiences.

To understand how personality affects consumer behavior, we must first take a look at how our personality is shaped. A common reference to our personality is the “big five” traits. The “big five” personality traits are openness, conscientiousness, agreeableness, extraversion, and neuroticism. Having an understanding of these five traits can help you see the reasoning behind the choices being made.

Each of these five traits has a HUGE impact on how you talk to, advertise to, and communicate with guests. Getting an understanding of these five personalities and building habits to help quickly identify these traits is key to being a step above your competitors in understanding your customers.

If you’d like a complete breakdown, I talk about these big five traits in my article, 5 Personality Traits to Help Understand Your Target Audience.

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