Prescribed consumption and consumers’ decision-making styles: A cross-cultural comparison between Europe and Asia

Purpose The goal of this research is 1) to check if shopping prescription consciousness is a fundamental decision-making characteristic, 2) to know its weight and position into consumer decision-making styles (DMS), and 3) to compare results between France and China. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative survey using the Consumer Styles Inventory (Sproles and Kendall, 1986) is done with 308 French and 221 Chinese pet food buyers. Factorial, multivariance, clustering and discriminant analyses are run. Findings Findings reveal that shopping prescription consciousness is a fundamental decision-making characteristic. Although this concept scores the same in both cultures, correlations between shopping prescription and other characteristics vary from a culture to another, showing a different prescription follower profile. In addition, opposite to our expectations prescription consciousness has a discriminant role on DMS in France but not in China. Finally, culture impacts overall DMS. Research limitations/implications The Chinese sample is weak. This study must be replicated in more product categories and involve more countries. This paper attempts to enrich prescribed consumption knowledge in a cross-cultural context. Practical implications This paper 1) enriches academic understanding of the decision delegation concept, in a cross-cultural context, and 2) encourages organizations involved in complex products to set up loyalty qualitative programs and prescriber networks to ease shopping decision and consequently increase sales. Originality/value This is the first time that decision delegation and prescription is studied according to decision-making styles in a cross-cultural context.