Individualist Culture

Based on the article, I found that individualist cultures are different compared to collectivist cultures in some aspects. We can differentiate individualist consumers and collectivist consumers by their life satisfaction, financial satisfaction or optimism and money management, tendency toward brands, inclination to travel, personal appearance, buying behaviour, in-group contact or influences, family influences, perception of female’s roles, security and stability in lives.

Generally, individualist consumers rate higher level of satisfaction of their current lives while collectivist consumer are more pessimistic about their current states of being. Individualist consumers indicate higher financial satisfaction and optimism than collectivist consumers. Individualist consumers are more likely consider themselves good manager of finance. Compared to consumers from collectivist culture, individualist culture indicates a higher tendency to stick to well-known brand names and show higher inclination to explore the world. Moreover, individualist consumers are less concern about their personal appearance and how they are seen by others. Since collectivist consumers are group-oriented, they tend to claim themselves as impulsive buyers and unplanned consumers. It might be interpreted by collectivist consumers as a way to demonstrate their in-group identity, show their concern with in-group norm, follow in-group trend and avoid loss of face in front of in-group member. In addition, they are more willing to be influenced by their in-group member and less likely to consider themselves as opinion leaders. Consumers from collectivist culture are more family-oriented and more conservative in their attitude toward the gender roles in society. Moreover, consumer from collectivist cultures are less tolerable of risks and uncertainty. On the other hand, individualist less likely stick to their routine lifestyles.

So, the study shows that China and Japan are collectivist cultures while British and US are individualist cultures. However, culture is dynamic and will change over time due to socio-economic change. Different cultural values should complement each other in explaining complex cross cultural differences in consumers’ lifestyles. In the context of international marketing, cross-cultural value orientation can profoundly affect the way products are consumed in a culture. Thus knowledge and understanding of cultural value are essential to successful international marketing effort. Marketer should involve the results of finding into the trade between Western and East Asian countries. The insight on cross-cultural value can help them to know better about specific consumer’s behaviour.