Predicting US and Chinese consumers' purchase intention of Korean textiles and apparel related cultural products

Abstract

This study aims to examine if a consumer`s evaluations of and purchase intentions towards textiles and apparel-related cultural products are influenced by their culture, as indicated by their nationalities. Additionally, several psychological variables, such as novelty-seeking tendency, world-mindedness, and familiarity with Northeast Asian culture were included in the analyses to compare the relative importance of cultural influences with the importance of individual characteristics. To conduct a quantitative analysis, we collected data from 400 female consumers in two countries: 200 from the USA and 200 from China. Key findings showed that, nationality and novelty-seeking were found to have a strong influence on purchase intention when product evaluation variables were not included. Evaluation of appearance and Northeast Asian design emerged highly significant predictors of purchase intention for Korean cultural products, regardless of the product type. Cross cultural comparative research on cultural product evaluations is extremely rare. This study focused on groups of consumers residing in the US and China and asked them to evaluate a series of textiles and apparel-related cultural products produced in Korea.