Consumer innovativeness and consideration set as antecedents of the consumer decision process for highly globalized new products : a three-country empirical study

In global, competitive markets, an understanding of consumer innovativeness is required to manage the adoption process for new high-tech products. Crucial to this understanding is the role of culture. Although a key element in the process by which consumer innovativeness and product experience impact consideration sets, little research exists regarding how culture actually moderates that process. In this study, we investigate the role that culture plays in facilitating the relationship between consumers' general and domain-specific innovativeness, and their decision-making as characterized by the size and composition of their consideration sets. We undertake this work in the People's Republic of China, the Republic of Korea, and the United States. We develop and test several research hypotheses pertaining to cultural effects on decision-making. The results support most of our hypotheses, suggesting that it is important for global marketers to target markets on the basis of domain-specific measures of consumer innovativeness.