The Influence Of Cultural Thinking Style On Consumer Cognitive Complexity Underlying Wine Purchase Decisions

Abstract

Drawing on the cultural priming paradigm, the purpose of this research is to investigate how cultural differences in cognition affect consumers’ hierarchical cognitive structures underlying wine purchase decision-making process. Means-end chain analyses of French and Korean wine consumers were conducted both at a chronic cultural difference level and at an experimental level in which either analytic or holistic thinking tendency is primed. The results show that the holistic thinking-primed consumers consider broader connections between the key perceptual elements of the means-end chain, resulting in more complex structures of interconnected motives than the analytic thinking-primed consumers. This study provides support for the dynamics of culture-specific thinking styles as the driver of cultural variations in wine consumers’ cognitive complexity in the decision-making process. Important practical implications for international food marketing managers stem from our cross-cultural findings.