A Study On Cultural Influences On Consumers' Decision-Making Styles

With the progress of economic, consumption has become main driver of economic growth and social development, while study of consumers'decision-making styles plays an increasingly important role in understanding individual requirments of consumers and grasping direction of economic development. Cross-cultural studies and comparisons of consumers'decision-making styles are developing fast with the promotion of consumption-globalization. Results show that there are significant differences on consumers'decision-making styles among different countries and regions and experts speculate that the differences are caused by culture.However, there is no evidence to support this conjecture.This paper attempts to introduce cultural factors into study of consumers'decision-making styles on the basements of study results on consumers'decision-making styles, culture and value, and establish model of consumers'decision-making styles based on cultural factors. Study the influence mechanism that cultural factors affect consumers' decision-making styles with values as intermediate variables in-depth. Verify the model and relationships between variables in the model.This paper applies two cultural dimensions of collectivism and individualism, two value dimensions of dominant values and explicit values, and eight kinds of consumer decision-making styles into the model of consumers'decision-making styles based on cultural factors, which has Hawkins's consumers'decision-making process model as the fundemental model.Overall,the results of empirical analysis reveal that cultural factors have significant influences on consumers' decision-making styles with values as intermediate variables. There are 3 major results in this paper as listed below:A. Summarizing the the authority theoretic and literature in the fields of consumers'decision-making styles, values and culture. Reasoning out the relationships among the three variables and establishing the model of consumers'decision-making styles based on cultural factors Mastering the measurements and reseach progresses of consumers'decision-making styles, values and culture.B.Forming a questionnaire composed of consumers' decision-making styles,values, culture and demographic variables and verifying the model with structural equation modeling and empirical research method based on survey data collected from 260 samples, while also verifing hypotheses of relationships between variables in the model.C.Studying the influence mechanism that cultural factors affect consumers'decision-making styles with values as intermediate variables in-depth. Making marketing recommendations combined with the five stages of consumer decision-making process.