The role of personality traits and motivation in determining brand ambassador performance in the alcoholic beverage industry

Abstract

The research explored the role of personality traits and motivation in determining Brand Ambassador (BA) performance. Fragmentation in the media and consumers who are more aware of clever marketing, are turning to the more credible messages and advice on products or services spread by BA’s within their circle of friends, before making purchasing decisions. Marketers seeking to recruit high potential BA’s need to know what personality traits are required for a BA to be successful. By implication a BA is type of sales representative and using the sales literature as the platform, successful sales representatives require all Big Five personality traits of Extraversion, Agreeableness, Conscientiousness, Neuroticism and Openness to Experience as well as Motivation.The NEO-FFI questionnaire was used to measure the Big Five personality traits, and was adapted to include a measure of Motivation. The questionnaire was completed by 120 BA’s from the South African Breweries (SAB) Egoli region, who had a performance record. T-tests, multiple regression and correlation were the statistical techniques employed to test the relationships between personality traits, motivation and BA performance.The outcome was that Conscientiousness was the only personality trait found tobe statistically significant. The results suggest that the BA rankings supplied by SAB were flawed. The reliability measures suggest that the NEO-FFI questionnaire needs to be adapted before being implemented in South Africa and a rating scale is a better indicator of performance proxy than ranking scale.