Culture and Consumer Behavior

Understanding how culture influences consumer behaviors is crucial to success in international marketing. In this monograph, the authors present a conceptual and empirical framework for understanding how culture impacts consumer behaviors, and recommend seven analytical steps for understanding similarities and differences between cultures as well as within-culture variations in consumer behaviors. These analytical steps are: (1) identify the key components of culture; (2) find out and describe the major clusters of countries or regions based on their similarities and differences in consumption behaviors; (3) relate similarities and differences in consumption behaviors to key components of culture; (4) develop and test specific hypotheses regarding the joint effects of different components of culture on consumption behaviors; (5) track the changes in consumption behavior within a country in response to social and economic development; (6) formulate and test specific hypotheses regarding the joint effects of different components of culture on changes in consumer behaviors within a country; and (7) conduct experimental studies to understand when consumers will follow cultural norms and when they will not. In the present monograph, we illustrate the utility of the proposed conceptual and analytical approach by combining business analytic and experimental methods to model tourist consumption, although this approach can be applied to explain behaviors in other domains of consumption. The authors close by suggesting several directions for future research on culture and behavior.