The world economy is becoming increasingly cross-cultural. During the next decades, as marketers enter new international markets, an understanding of how culture influences consumer behavior will be crucial for both managers and consumer researchers. This article presents a framework that integrates and reinterprets current research in cross-cultural consumer behavior. The framework also serves to identify areas that need further research and can be used as a template for marketers seeking to understand their foreign consumers. The article also attempts to integrate from an applied perspective two distinct traditions in the study of culture and consumer behavior: the anthropological approach and the cross-cultural psychology tradition.

The Web is intrinsically a global medium. Consequently, deciding how a Web site should express potentially culture-specific content to worldwide visitors is an important consideration in Web site design. In this article, the authors examine some of the site content characteristics that can lead Web site visitors to an optimal navigation experience, or flow, in a cross-cultural context. In particular, a cognitive frameworkfocuses on the effect of culture on attitudes toward the site and flow. The authors suggest that the congruity of a Web site with a visitor’s culture is a site content characteristic that influences the likelihood of experiencing flow. The authors develop a conceptual model to account for the impact of culture and other site content characteristics on flow and describe preliminary evidence supporting their model.

Bicultural bilingual individuals have incorporated two cultures within themselves and speak the languages of those cultures. When cued by a particular language, these individuals activate distinct sets of culture-specific concepts, or mental frames, which include aspects of their identities. Three studies show that language-triggered frame switching (i.e., switching from one set of mental frames to another) occurs only with biculturals, not with bilinguals who are not bicultural. The studies uncover frame switching at the within-individual level, and they include both qualitative and experimental evidence. They also provide a methodology to identify the relative activation strength of specific mental frames in different languages. (c) 2008 by JOURNAL OF CONSUMER RESEARCH, Inc..

This article examines a psycholinguistic model of bilingual concept organization and extends it to the processing of advertisements by bilingual consumers. The model suggests that second-language (L2) messages result in inferior memory as compared with first-language (L1) stimuli. These language asymmetries in memory are thought to occur because processing an L2 message at a conceptual level is less likely than processing an L1 message conceptually. Applying this notion to advertisements, this research examines picture-text congruity as a potential moderator of language effects in memory. The results suggest that a high level of congruity between picture and text facilitates conceptual processing of L2 messages, increasing memory for second-language ads and thereby reducing the impact of language asymmetries on memory.T his article explores how bilingual individuals process advertising messages. Consumer researchers have devoted relatively little attention to bilingual information processing and have instead focused on investigating how monolingual individuals process information (Usunier 1996). However, given that many, if not most, of the world's consumers speak more than one language (Grossjean 1982; Hoffman 1991), understanding how bilingual individuals process information in their first as compared with their second language is of crucial importance to consumer research.Several studies have begun to examine the role of language in advertising. Koslow, Shamdasani, and Touchstone (1994) applied a sociolinguistic approach to study how bilingual Hispanics perceive marketers' sensitivity to their culture. Studies by Schmitt, Pan, and Tavassoli (1994) and Schmitt and Zhang (1998) used a psycholinguistics approach to examine how differences between two specific languages, Chinese and English, affect the manner in which monolingual speakers of each language process information. These studies shed light on the link between language and consumers' cognitive structures and represent a significant step forward in the application of linguistic theory to advertising.However, to this date, there is a dearth of research examining how bilingual consumers process advertisements.We examine bilingual consumers' processing of marketing messages by extending a psycholinguistic model, the Revised Hierarchical Model, or RHM, to advertising (Dufour and Kroll 1995;Kroll and de Groot 1997). The RHM describes how bilingual individuals process words corresponding to two languages. This model suggests that conceptual or semantic processing is less likely to occur when a word is encountered in an individual's second language than when it is presented in his first language. Thus, the RHM implies that memory for second-language messages will be inferior to memory for first-language messages. The model applies to bilingual speakers of any two languages, so it is of importance to researchers interested in different subcultures.Our research investigates the RHM's predictions of asymmetries in memory for first-and second-language stimuli and ex...

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