The importance of intangible social attributes in individual purchasing decisions: A multi-country comparative study

Abstract

This paper examines the role that intangible attributes-brand, country of origin and environmental and labor conditions-play in product choice across six countries. Our results show that: 1) brand is more important for consumers in developing countries purchasing high involvement products, 2) social attributes are generally more influential in developed countries, and 3) some country consumers exhibited very strong domestic country biases when making decisions about purchases. We believe that our results offer a more accurate picture of the role of intangibles since they are based on multi-cue, multi-product design that forced consumers to make tradeoffs between tangible and intangible attri..