Susceptibility to global consumer culture : scale development and purchase behaviour of Shanghai consumers

Global Consumer Culture (GCC) is a term emerged in early 1990s. It refers to generally accepted beliefs and consumer tendencies toward globally shared consumption-related symbols such as brands, product categories, and consumption activities and events. Although researchers sought insights in this area in the last decade, they mainly focused on the specific topic of Brand Positioning method under the context of GCC. Little efforts were made to examine what global consumers actually do and think when making their buying decision, and what the common characteristics global consumers share in the world. The existence and increasing influence of global consumers whose social and cultural differences are overshadowed by their similarities in terms of psychological consumer tendencies was demonstrated by previous research. In addition, there was an initial study to develop an individual customer psychology-based scale of Susceptibility to Global Consumer Culture (SGCC) in order to capture globally shared consumption sentiments. The study demonstrated that SGCC would consist of three major dimensions of SGCC, namely conformity to social norms, desire for social prestige, and quality perception. This thesis suggests that SGCC contain three additional dimensions in the perspective of consumer traits and brand consumption, including consumer innovativeness, consumer ethnocentrism, and Internet technology readiness. It is consisted of two studies. In Study 1, a more comprehensive multiple dimensional scale to measure SGCC is developed and validated. In Study 2, the developed scale is used to predict the consumers’ purchase intentions toward global brand products. Theoretical contributions, managerial contributions, research limitations and future research recommendations are discussed as well