What characterizes Chinese consumer behavior? A cross-industry analysis of the Chinese diaspora in Japan
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What characterizes Chinese consumer behavior? A cross-industry analysis of the Chinese diaspora in Japan Björn Frank & Gulimire Abulaiti & Takao Enkawa
Published online: 4 April 2012 # Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2012
Abstract In order to profit from China’s enormous business opportunities, international firms need to know Chinese consumer preferences. To learn more about intrinsic Chinese consumer preferences and their distinction from other Asian consumer preferences, this study analyzes differences in the formation of customer satisfaction, repurchase intent, and word-of-mouth intent between Chinese-born and locally born consumers in Japan. Verifying culture-based hypotheses, cross-industry analyses show that Chinese-born consumers pay less attention to the public brand image and risk-related switching costs, but more attention to quality expectations, perceived value, experienced usefulness, and financial switching costs than Japanese consumers. Marketing strategies should account for these preference structures. Keywords China . Customer satisfaction . Customer loyalty . Japan . Repurchase intent . Quality expectation . Word-of-mouth
1 Introduction As Western economies are stagnating and Asia exhibits strong economic growth, the world’s economic center of gravity is moving towards Asia (Grether and Mathys 2008). To profit from new market opportunities, it is thus imperative for Western marketing managers to gain a deeper understanding of consumer behavior in Asia. With a steady record of 10 % annual growth and a population 50 % larger than the entire developed world, China is expected to become the world’s largest economy sometime this century (CIA 2011). Moreover, millions of Chinese are moving abroad and forming major communities in other countries. While the Chinese diaspora already constitutes a major share of the population in numerous Asian countries, globalization may well result in a similar scenario in other developed countries (New B. Frank (*) : G. Abulaiti : T. Enkawa Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Tokyo Institute of Technology, W9-53, 2-12-1 O-okayama, Meguro-ku, Tokyo 152-8552, Japan e-mail: [email protected]
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World Encyclopedia 2010). Therefore, one of the major business challenges of this century will be to effectively sell to Chinese consumers, whether in China or the rest of the world (Garner 2006; Grether and Mathys 2008). Despite this immense need for knowledge, the marketing literature has not yet sufficiently clarified the characteristics of Chinese consumer behavior. As pointed out by Heine (2010), a drawback of extant studies comparing consumer behavior in China and other countries is that they confound differences in consumer behavior with differences in both national regulations and the quality of locally offered products and services (Maccoby 1994; Meng and Nasco 2009; Sharma 2010; Zhou et al. 2002). Another drawback is that these studies mainly discuss differences between Western and Eastern consumer behavior
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