Culture and Consumer Behavior: A Review and Agenda for Future Research

Culture is a fundamental driver of consumer behavior. This chapter reviews the three most common approaches for incorporating culture into frameworks of consumer behavior and describes key findings about: (1) the effect of culture on consumers’ attention and information processing, (2) the persuasiveness of culturally matched advertising messages, (3) the contexts in which culture is more likely to impact consumer behavior, and (4) the behavior of bicultural consumers. The chapter concludes with a discussion of a future research agenda that focuses on the study of the tightness–looseness (T-L) distinction for refining cultural predictions, the further integration of the different approaches to cultural research for understanding a variety of consumer phenomena in a globalized world, the adoption of a polycultural approach for explaining the behavior of multicultural consumers with knowledge about two or more cultures, and the potential insights from new methodologies borrowed from neuroscience, machine learning, and big data analyses.