Prescribed consumption and consumers' decision making styles: A cross cultural comparison between Europe and Asia
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to check if shopping prescription consciousness is a fundamental decision making characteristic, to know its weight and position into consumer decision making styles (DMS) and to compare results between France and China. Design/methodology/approach A quantitative survey using the Consumer Styles Inventory (Sproles and Kendall, 1986) is done with 308 French and 221 Chinese pet food buyers. Factorial, multivariance, clustering and discriminant analyses are run. Findings Findings reveal that shopping prescription consciousness is a fundamental decision making characteristic. Although this concept scores the same in both cultures, correlations between shopping prescription and other characteristics vary from a culture to another, showing a different prescription follower profile. In addition, opposite to our expectations prescription consciousness has a discriminant role on DMS in France but not in China. Finally, culture impacts overall DMS. Research limitations/im.