文化价值观、消费者感知价值和购买决策风格:基于中国城市化差异的比较研究

Cultural Value, Perceived Value, and Consumer Decision-making Style in China: A Comparison based on Urbanization Dimension

过去的一些研究通常认为,同一个国家的消费者具有相同的文化价值观。对于中国这样一个幅员广阔的国家来说,将其整体视为一个文化单位与消费者行为之间建立联系,不能有效揭示市场中各区域消费者的行为差异。本研究从城市化程度角度出发,比较了四类区域消费者在文化价值观、消费者感知价值和购买决策风格方面的差异。结果显示,城市化程度不同的地区消费者在文化价值观、感知价值和购买决策风格上存在显著差异。高城市化区域消费者的开放价值观显著高于低城市化程度地区,这使得消费者感知价值中社会价值和功能价值的重要性显著较高,并导致消费者购买决策风格偏离价格导向,倾向于品牌导向和质量导向。该结果为企业营销策略的制定提供了有益参考。

With the largest consumer group and fast-growing purchase power, China has become one of the most important emerging markets in the world. To get an in-depth understanding on the decision-making style of Chinese consumers is an important approach to learning con- sumers for enterprises who try for success in the market. Although some previous research has measured the decision-making style of Chinese consumer, the results did not sufficiently reveal the actual situations of the whole group. As a crucial antecedent of consumer behaviors, cultural value has not been taken into consideration in this research, because it is naturally assumed that there are homogeneous cultural values within a given country. However, for countries such as China which has vast area and unbalanced regional development, tak- ing it as the unit of cultural measuring to analyze concrete consumer behaviors can＇t identify the differences in consumer behavior among regions. According to the cultural materialism perspective, the dif- ferences in material infrastructure lead to distinctive cultural values, which further form different behavioral patterns. As the material in- frastructure among four types of regions categorized by urbanization degree, metropolis, small and medium city, county, and rural area, differs significantly, it＇s necessary to explore the influences of different cultural values on consumer decision-making style. Therefore, based on urbanization dimension, the research makes a comparison on cultur- al value, perceived value and consumer decision-making style among four types of regions in China. The data were collected by survey. The findings reveal that there are significant differences in cultural value, perceived value and consumer decision-making style among regions with different urbanization degree. The research also suggests, with the increase of urbanization, the openness to change dimension in cultural value improves significantly, which leads to the increased emphasis on social value and functional value dimensions in consumer perceived value, and causes consumer decision-making styles of brand conscious- ness and quality consciousness instead of price consciousness. The results provide references to the development of marketing strategy for the Chinese market.