The Effects of Allocentrism and Idiocentrism on Consumers' Product Attribute Evaluation

Abstract

Recent deregulations of the telecommunications industry in Taiwan have created a booming market for a variety of telecommunications services and equipment providers. The mobile telephony industry benefits most from such regulatory changes, as it grows from non-existence to 100% penetration in less than 15 years. Previous cross-cultural studies often use country/national culture as the unit of analysis; recent research has indicated that there are within-cultural variations among different consumer segments. On the basis of Hofstede's conceptualization of individualism-collectivism dimension, the present study aims to examine whether consumers' idiocentrism-allocentrism has effects on the evaluation of cellular phone attributes. The study uses a questionnaire survey to collect empirical data. Independent sample t-tests find that idiocentric and allocentric consumers are consistently different from each other in their product attribute evaluation. Compared with allocentric consumers, idiocentric consumers consistently place more emphasis on cellular telephone attributes that are congruent with their cultural value orientation.