This week I read “Getting some of that personality: There is an app for that!” by Sally Rao Hill and Francois Carrillat. The article discussed how brands not only communicate with consumers by trying to sell their product, but they also influence consumers' personalities. Social media has made it so people interact with brands differently. I thought that it was interesting that the article talked about how people express themselves differently on different social media outlets. The article said that people usually want to express themselves as more casual on outlets like snapchat and more attractive on more permanent social media outlets like Instagram. I have also noticed a similar trend. One thing that has most likely changed from the time that this article was released and now is the developing popularity of Tik Tok. I was one of the early adopters of Tik Tok, and I have seen how much it has changed. I downloaded Tik Tok right before their big rebrand in 2018. Tik Tok was called Musically when I downloaded it. The format was much different. Musically was more on the side of disingenuous posts like Instagram where the main purpose was to look attractive. People did lip syncs and danced to music, and there was little indication of individuals personalities. As Musically rebranded to Tik Tok, I noticed a major shift in the content on the app. People started responding to videos on Tik Tok with their reactions, which started to make Tik Tok feel more genuine. Over time, Tik Tok turned into a much more genuine place. The most popular videos on Tik Tok required little planning and emphasized the more unrehearsed low production value videos. Another thing that makes Tik Tok popular is the highly personalized feed. This highly personalized feed also lends itself for much more personalized targeted ads. This leads us to an important quote from the article- “consumers evaluate a brand personality positively when their self-concept matches the brand personality and negatively when their self-concept does not match.”. This incentivises advertisers to find their target demographic even more than usual. If you think from a marketing perspective, you would only want to spend money on advertisements that reach the target audience as closely as possible. I, along with many others, have noticed that the ads on my social media feeds are very targeted. It’s hard to say if this is really beneficial to the consumer or not. One one hand, you get more ads that match up with your personality and that can make it easier to make a decision on the things that you buy. On the other hand, the ads might not be showing the best option. So as a consumer, it’s still important to do research on a product before buying it. On the other hand, targeted ads could also reinforce stereotypes of certain demographic groups. Ads are shoved in our faces by nature, so they have a huge impact on pop culture and how we view ourselves.
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