The Consumer of Social Media. An Intergenerational Approach

Abstract

Based on generations’ cohort theory, the purpose of this study is to study the social media consumer persona from an intergenerational perspective: by comparing the last three adult generations: X, Y and Z. In order to create the consumer persona of each generation we decided to use the Cattell 16 personality’s model to measure first of their own personality traits perception, and, also, the perceived personality of their favorite social media platform. By comparing those two, we want to see if there is a correlation between them. The results show that the difference between the behaviors of social media consumer may be explained by the personality traits theory. So, there is a relationship between the human being personality traits as perceived by themselves and the preferred brand personality traits – in this case the social media brand personality traits.

Keywords

• generations’ cohort theory
• social media consumer persona
• intergenerational perspective
• cattell personality traits model