CULTURED MINDS

CONCLUSION & FURTHER RESEARCH

 

This paper demonstrates a plethora of ways culture can affect consumer decision making. There is no one ‘shared lens’ through which individuals interpret the world around them, rather, each person has access to multiple lenses which can be used or ignored depending on environmental cues or social context. Many of the cultural lenses discussed, such as having an analytic thinking style or high uncertainty avoidance, lead to systematic biases in decision making. Thus, understanding these factors is of considerable importance for marketers. 

 

 

All humans share a brain, but we do not use it in the same way.

Our values and beliefs, which are in turn shaped by cultural upbringing and context, act as guidelines for how to employ our cognitive capacities. The rich variation in behaviours that we observe today is testament to the diversity of these values and belief systems.

 

 

Culture & consumer behaviour are messy.

Since this paper errs on the side of clarity, it simplifies the complex consumer-culture interaction and can give a false impression of order. Culture and behaviour are messy; they do not lend themselves well to definitions and boxes. 

 

 

Cultural dimensions are guidelines (to direct fruther in-the-field testing)

Practitioners may not need a comprehensive understanding of the culture-consumer behaviour interaction to derive value. Many effects discussed appear robust so their nuances, as detailed in the literature, need not be obsessed over since they will change depending on the situation. Because cross-cultural findings still lack accurate predictive power for many real-life instances, cultural dimensions and theories should instead serve as guidelines which inform a hypothesis to be tested by further market research. For example, there is evidence that product categories are treated very differently to others. Consumer response to travel and electronic products appears less culturally sensitive (Yip, 1995 cited in Nelson & Paek, 2007; Dawar & Parker, 1994), whereas food is generally considered to be consumed in traditional ways (Fischler, 1988) cited in (Nelson & Paek, 2007).