The Importance and Realization of Personal Values and Cognitive Age
The Importance and Realization of Personal Values and Cognitive Age

Summary/Abstract: Purpose – Population aging has emerged as a powerful megatrend affecting many countries, including Hungary. This demographic change will impact on many aspects of life, especially on consumption. The senior consumer market is becoming an increasingly important market for marketing professionals to understand and address. With this in mind, this paper is aimed at gaining a better understanding of older Hungarian consumers by exploring cognitive age and the importance and realization of personal values. Design/Methodology/Approach – An online study carried out on a sample of 281 respondents among the Hungarian population aged 50–65 to collect data which was analyzed to answer the research questions. Measurement scales were adapted to measure the importance and realization of personal values and the cognitive age of the respondents. Findings and Implications – A comparison of the importance and realization value scales revealed differences in the value rankings among the cognitive age groups. The correspondence between the realization and importance of values differed among the values, with the highest consistency found for modesty, generosity, sincerity, and honesty. An understanding of the values which are the most important to potential consumers (as life goals) and realized to the highest degree can provide useful information for decision-making on product positioning, branding, and communications. Limitations – One of the limitations of our research online concerns data collection, which excluded persons who are not active online. Further research is needed to investigate the relationship between measures of values in terms of their importance and realization and other aspects of consumption behavior that are driven by personal value perspectives. Originality – This paper contributes to the state of the field of research on older consumers in general and Hungarianolder consumers in particular. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study in marketing to directly investigate the importance and realization of personal values and their relationship with cognitive age on a sample of older Hungarian consumers. Unlike most of the research in this field, the paper explores not only the importance of personal values but also their realization according to the identified cognitive age groups of older consumers.

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