Cultural Differences in Design-Based Product Evaluation: The Role of Holistic and Analytic Thinking

Abstract

Product evaluation research has a long tradition of examining how consumers evaluate a product from the product itself in an attempt to understand why certain products are better perceived or worse perceived. Usually consumers recall the memory of high evaluation products in their minds when they make buying decisions. Better fitting perceptions would be more favorable than poor fitting ones. Our findings indicate that culture is an important reason that influences consumers’ responses to design-based product evaluations. Westerners evaluate products differently than Easterners due to cross-cultural differences in styles of thinking. Two cultures of people have differences in design-based product evaluation. In most cases, Easterners have more favorable evaluations of a new packaging product than Westerners.