OVERVIEWEvery year, multinational companies spend billions of dollars in marketing their products around the world. Some of this money is wasted or, worse, actually damages the marketer's reputation through cultural or linguistic faux pas (e.g., Ricks, 1983). As new global markets emerge, and existing markets become increasingly segmented along ethnic or subcultural lines, the need to market eff ectively to consumers who have diff erent cultural values has never been more acute. Th us, it is no surprise that in the last ten to 15 to 20 years, culture has rapidly emerged as a central focus of research in consumer psychology.
What is Culture?Culture is a crucial concept for the understanding of consumer behavior because it is the lens through which people view marketing messages and products. Culture consists of shared elements that provide the standards for perceiving, believing, evaluating, communicating, and acting among those who share a language, a historical period, and a geographic location. As a psychological construct, culture can be studied in multiple ways-across nations, across ethnic groups within nations, across individuals within nations (focusing on cultural orientation), and even within individuals through the priming of cultural values. As will be discussed presently, regardless of how culture is studied, cultural distinctions have been demonstrated to have important implications for advertising content, persuasiveness of appeals, consumer motivation, consumer judgment processes, and consumer response styles.
Chapter Organization and ScopeIn this chapter, numerous studies on these topics are reviewed and discussed. Because reviewing the rapidly growing area of cross-cultural psychology could fi ll several handbook chapters, we are by necessity selective in our coverage. We focus more heavily on fi ndings specifi c to the consumer domain rather than a more general review of cultural diff erences. Th e content is organized around both the theoretical and the methodological implications of cultural diff erences in consumer judgments. Th e individualism/collectivism cultural construct and independent/interdependent selfconstrual construct are given special attention because extensive research has demonstrated the implications of these variables for outcomes relevant to consumer behavior. Because the study of culture requires the cross-cultural equivalence of measurement, the second half of this chapter addresses in detail specifi c measurement issues and culturally based response biases likely to be of interest to consumer psychologists. We close with a review of issues and methods for addressing measurement equivalence and cultural variability in response styles.
CULTURAL VARIATION: STRUCTURAL ISSUES
What Are the Key Cultural Constructs or Dimensions?Th e constructs of individualism and collectivism represent the most broadly used dimensions of cultural variability for cross-cultural comparison (Gudykunst & Ting-Toomey, 1988). In individualistic (IND) cultures, people tend to prefer independent rel...