Multiple shades of culture: insights from experimental consumer research

Abstract

This chapter provides a timeline for cross-cultural consumer research. It suggests that cross-cultural consumer research has gone through three stages: the introduction stage during the late 1990s, a growth stage in the early 2000s, and the maturity stage in the early 2010s. The chapter suggests that most of the earlier work primarily focused on: marketing communication content that would be persuasive across different cultures and different information processing styles across cultures. It also demonstrates that the earlier work on cross-cultural consumer psychology mainly focused on individualism-collectivism dimensions of culture and neglected the other cultural orientations. The chapter then provide evidence that most of the cross-cultural consumer research in early 2000s and 2010 focused on the effects of other cultural orientations on consumer behavior, the effects of culture on goals and motivation, and the effects of cultural orientations on brand and product evaluations as well as the development of culture-related phenomena.