Indicators of culture: Content, processes, and values

Abstract

Abstract This article offers a framework for conceptualizing culture and understanding its influence on consumer behavior. We review various theoretical formulations capturing cultural influence, ranging from macrolevel approaches relying on bipolar cultural dimensions to microlevel, cognitively oriented views. Drawing on these perspectives, we identify three “indicators of culture”—cultural content and symbols, processes and thinking styles, and value orientations—and discuss how these indicators manifest in various consumer domains and consequently guide processing and/or outcomes. We then raise methodological considerations, highlighting the imprecise, ambiguous use of priming techniques (e.g., pronoun circling) that may conflate what are presumably distinct culture‐related constructs, hampering clear theoretical interpretation. Finally, we discuss how future research can increase our understanding of cultural influence by first identifying the unique contributions of each cultural indicator and then understanding how they might interact.

Affiliated Institutions

• University of Cincinnati US
• The University of Sydney AU

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