Every product is a cultural product and every buying is a cultural buying and therefore it is a cultural relationship between the consumer and the product. A consumer views the product from a worldview born out of different cultural practices that give birth to habits. The consumer uses a particular language to explain his/her worldview. In the process of relationship between the product and consumer, the consumer gives meaning to the product that he/she buys. Once the product is bought and consumed, the meaning he/she had given provides now a sense of fulfilment, a meaning to the consumer’s life that we call it cognitive resonance. If the product does not give the sense of satisfaction, it will cause a cognitive dissonance that makes the consumer dispose the product. Hence when we study the consumer behaviour, we need to focus on (1)the worldview that is born out of (2)culture, and expressed in (3)a language and the (4)relationship the consumer has with the product in the process of buying. In the entire process, the cultural worldview gives the consumer an agency, what we call human agency, to decide when, where why and what to buy. This paper suggests a way to study consumer behaviour from a cultural perspective.

The risk taken by the investor depends on several independent variables like: personality, biological age, investment experience and income. The main aim of this article is to combine all these variables in order to build an exhaustive risk profile on the basis of the Big Five Personality dimensions. The research method applied is exploratory in nature and questionnaire survey method was employed to gather data from 436 secondary equity market investors residing in the Chennai city of India. ANOVA was employed to develop the risk profile. The outcome of the research was an exhaustive risk profile combining all the related variables and a regression model predicting the equity returns. The main conclusions of the study are that the investors with the more of the conscientiousness personality tend to take less risk. This finding was also consistent among the senior investors, high income investors and those with mediocre/ high investment experience. The study also concluded that the agreeable investors with high income/high investment experience, tend to take less risk. Only the young investors with more of the conscientiousness personality tend to take more risk and with more of the extraversion personality tend to take less risk. This study serves as a guidance for advisors to provide appropriate recommendations on the basis of the risk appetite and personality of the investors.