Bernd Schmitt

“Consumer cognition across cultures”

Coauthor(s): Nader Tavassoli.

Editors: M. Kotabe and K. Helsen

Abstract:
Do consumers in different cultures evoke different mental structures and processes when they process commercial information? How can we describe these differences? Do these differences affect behavior? These questions, which form the core of research on consumer cognition across cultures, have been barely addressed. Rather than being cross-cultural or comparative in its approach, most research on consumer cognition has been culture-bound. This reality is reflected also in consumer cognition's core discipline of psychology where "culture" was a keyword in only 1.2 percent of articles in the major cognitive and experimental psychology journals between 1994 and 2002 (Hansen 2005). Even when cultural factors are considered in psychological or consumer behavior research, data are most often collected on convenience samples of middle-to-upper-class students. Students, however, may constitute a biased sample, and student cognitions may not be representative of the culturally determined cognitions of the broader population.

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