This article investigates the problem of Polish and South Korean Millennials' consumer behaviour on the e-commerce market. There were arguments about whether Generation Y members as Digital Natives are rather a coherent or diversifi ed cohort of consumers. They were raised in the culturally diversifi ed world, but the trend of globalization and the use of the Internet may infl uence their consumer behaviour in a similar way. The aim of this paper is to reveal particular patterns crucial to understanding their way of making an online purchase. An online survey was conducted among Polish and South Korean respondents from Generation Y in order to investigate this issue. Besides being the representatives of culturally distant cultures, the two groups from the research sample revealed mostly convergent preferences and attitudes towards making an online purchase. Also, Polish and South Korean respondents revealed different attitudes online and offl ine, when compared to the cohort general analysis. In terms of making an online purchase via their mobile phones, Poles and Koreans remained coherent outside their national group and diversifi ed inside their national group in terms of e-commerce but patterns slightly differed. Since this research was limited by too general e-commerce context, the aspect of making m-purchase should be investigated in the future.
JEL classifi cation: M300, M310, M390, M00, M160, M100, M190, M370Keywords: e-Commerce, Generation Y, Poland, South Korea
INTRODUCTIONGlobalization enabled business internationalization. Adjusting to the culturally distant markets with implementation of e-commerce online channels became crucial for a business. This might be regarded as online internalization (Garcia et al., 2015). Because of globalization, young adults were acclaimed as being globally oriented and homogeneous, from global brands and multinational fi rms perspective. Nevertheless, some research concerning glocal cultural identity might provide the assumption that young adults mixed their global and local approach, which made them differentiated in terms of global and local consumption patterns (Strizhakova et al., 2012). What reveals the ambiguity while attempting to understand e-consumer behaviour with focus on personal values might be technology paradoxes that concern divergent attitudes towards the
Journal of Marketing and Consumer Behaviour in Emerging Markets 2(2)2015Aleksandra Korzeniowska (33)(34)(35)(36)(37)(38)(39)(40)(41)(42)(43)(44)(45)(46)(47)(48) same aspect at the same time: freedom and enslavement, engaging and disengaging, assimilation and dissimilation, effi ciency and ineffi ciency, control and chaos, fulfi lling and creating needs, competence and incompetence, new and obsolete. The dichotomic pairs identifi ed by Mick and Founier (1998) concern: competence and incompetence as well as assimilation and isolation. After encoding those complex personal values, they should be incorporated into advertising and other forms of company communication, according to the specifi c In...