The Handbook of International Advertising Research

7

International and Cross-Cultural Consumer Behavior

Marieke de Mooij

Introduction

In order to develop effective advertising we want to know what moves people. When advertising across borders, we will have to find out what moves people in different countries and find explanations for any differences. Hence the growing interest in the influence of culture on consumer behavior.

The two most important areas of international advertising research are cultural values and the effectiveness of standardization versus differentiation strategy (Okazaki & Mueller, 2007). For the latter, only recently studies have included performance criteria and several have demonstrated that an adaptation strategy is more effective (Calantone, Kim, Schmidt, & Cavusgil, 2006; Dow, 2005; Okazaki, Taylor, & Zou, 2006; Wong & Merrilees, 2007). As a result, understanding culture will be viewed as increasingly important. This chapter presents how cultural models can be used for explaining differences in consumer behavior, with major focus on the Hofstede model.

Topics from Consumer Behavior Theory

Figure 7.1 pulls together a number of aspects of consumer behavior that are most relevant for international advertising. First of all, cultural values should be viewed as an integrated part of the consumer’s self, not as an environmental factor. Cultural values define the self and personality of consumers. Next the figure distinguishes mental processes and social processes. Mental processes are mostly internal processes: how ...