Collectivistic Culture

The contrast between individualistic cultures and collectivistic cultures has brought different consumer behavior in cross-cultural understanding (Maheswaran and Shavitt, 2000). According to Usunier and Lee (2009), advertising is influenced strongly by culture as it mostly based on language, image and the attitudes of the local target population. In the study of Teng (2003) about culture and consumer behavior, he indicated that culture and advertising greatly impact to each other. By analyzing the difference in consumer behavior between Chinese where collectivism predominant and North America where culture is based on individualism, Teng stated that social concerns are very important for collectivists. People in collectivistic cultures are

With this argument, it can be seen that culture strongly influences the effectiveness of advertising and consumption of brand, thus, it is important to match advertising to culture when it goes to international market, especially in the contrasting cultures such as individualistic and

The study investigated the relationship between national culture and consumer decision making in the purchasing process of cell phones – a product has enormous social impact in every countries. Hofstede’s cultural dimension (1984) was applied as a reference to allow the comparison of the three different cultures (Brazil, United States and Japan). Similarly to the previous study about Singapore and Australia, Leng and Botelho’s (2010) research show conflicted evidence for application of Hofstede’s typology of cultural on individualistic – collectivistic, masculine and uncertainty avoidance. The results showed that these dimensions do not interact with each other when it came to decision making process. Particularly, a quality conscious decision making style is dependent on both power distance and individualistic cultures. In that situation, if the research is based on power distance dimension, Brazilians would be more quality conscious; nevertheless, if individualism stands out, the United States would be the most quality conscious country compare to Brazil and Japan. Furthermore, the study result showed that brand conscious decision making style is the characteristic of individualistic culture. Leng and Botelho (2010) emphasized that people in individualistic countries use brand to express their individualism rather than reflect the level