A cross‐cultural examination of attitudes towards aberrant consumer behaviour in the marketplace: some preliminary results from the USA, New Zealand and Singapore

Abstract

Recent initiatives in business curricula have included emphasis on global business and ethics. Combines these issues by comparing the ethical predisposition of business students in New Zealand and Singapore to their US counterparts. A sample of 373 students indicated that the students in the three countries generally hold high expectations for the behaviour of consumers. The overall predisposition of the three groups as measured by the grand mean of the responses was virtually identical. However, of the 14 scenarios evaluated, four exhibited significant differences between the three groups. In two of these four, students from New Zealand expressed greater tolerance for questionable consumer action while US students expressed greater concern in regard to the other two. Singapore’s situation was somewhat in the middle. The results indicate that a global measure of ethical predisposition may be misleading and that ethical attitudes may be situational. Marketers must consider the characteristics of each country when assessing risk.

Citation

Fullerton, S., Taylor, D. and Gosh, B.C. (1997), "A cross‐cultural examination of attitudes towards aberrant consumer behaviour in the marketplace: some preliminary results from the USA, New Zealand and Singapore", Marketing Intelligence & Planning, Vol. 15 No. 5, pp. 208-212. https://doi.org/10.1108/02634509710177215