Culture, Time Orientation, and Exploratory Buying Behavior

This article provides researchers and practitioners with a better understanding of how consumers behave within a cross-cultural context. Literature often focuses on culture per se, but to understand consumer behavior better in a cross-cultural context, some studies have considered variables other than the key component elements of culture, encompassing families friends, society, etc. This research focuses on two slightly different variables: the perception of time and exploratory buying behavior. Within this context the first section of the paper validates the Time Style Scale and the Exploratory Buying Behavior Scale within a cross-cultural context. Results show that the Temporal Styles Scale (Usunier and Valette-Florence, 1994) is validated when using the entire dataset as well as data from an English version of the instrument. However, data collected from the Chinese version of the questionnaire does not fit the model well. The Exploratory Buying Behavior Scale (Baumgartner and Steenkamp, 1996) can be reduced to four exploratory acquisition of products (EAP) and three exploratory information seeking (EIS) items. Data collected from both language versions are considered as fitting the model adequately. The second section of the research examines the relation between elements of culture, time orientation, exploratory buying behavior, and consumer behavior. Results of a canonical analysis show that the group of variables associated with culture are best at discriminating the phenomenon. However, as far as the variables are concerned, the exploratory product-acquisition factor has a more important role than some variables associated with culture.