The Influence of Culture on Impulse Buying Behavior: A Systematic Literature Review

ABSTRACT

Culture plays a significant buying role in shaping different aspects of consumer behavior such as rational, impulse, and compulsive buying behavior. Impulse buying is one of the prevalent phenomena that significantly affect the sales revenue of companies. This study focuses on unveiling the interaction between cultural factors and impulse buying behavior. For this systematic literature review, 112 significant articles were examined to understand the relationship between various aspects of culture and impulse buying behavior in both online and offline contexts. Further investigation of impulse buying in cross-cultural context helps to understand and classify different theoretical perspectives to study impulse buying behavior and cultural factors. This study offers practical implications for retail professionals and e-commerce strategists to design and implement viable cross-cultural marketing campaigns. Academic researchers may also understand research gaps and contribute further to understanding cross-cultural impulse buying.

KEYWORDS
Culture; Cross-cultural; impulse buying; online impulse buying; systematic literature review

Resumo

A cultura desempenha um papel de compra significativo na formação de diferentes aspectos do comportamento do consumidor, como comportamento de compra racional, por impulso e compulsivo. A compra por impulso é um dos fenômenos predominantes que afetam significativamente a receita de vendas das empresas. Este estudo tem como objetivo desvendar a interação entre fatores culturais e o comportamento de compra por impulso. Para esta revisão sistemática da literatura, 112 artigos significativos foram examinados para entender a relação entre vários aspectos da cultura e o comportamento de compra por impulso em contextos online e offline. Uma investigação mais aprofundada da compra por impulso no contexto intercultural ajuda a entender e classificar diferentes perspectivas teóricas para estudar o comportamento de compra por impulso e os fatores culturais. Este estudo oferece implicações práticas para profissionais de varejo e estrategistas de comércio eletrônico para projetar e implementar campanhas de marketing interculturais viáveis. Pesquisadores acadêmicos também podem entender as lacunas de pesquisa e contribuir ainda mais para a compreensão da compra por impulso intercultural.

PALAVRAS-CHAVE
Cultura; Transcultural; compra por impulso; compra por impulso online; revisão sistemática da literatura

1. Introduction

Culture regulates the human behavior (Hartston & Koran, 2002; White et al., 2018; Ziada et al., 2020); it consists of behavior arrangements that are learned and exhibited by the society & their individual members through their surroundings (Arnould & Thompson, 2005; Verma et al., 2017). Globalization has open doors for the businesses to operate internationally. Thorough understanding of cultural factors that influence consumer behavior is a must for firms operating in international markets (de Mooij & Hofstede, 2011).

Impulsive buying is one of the most important aspect for businesses as impulse purchases are contributing significantly to overall revenue and profitability of firms (Duarte et al., 2013). Studies are conducted to establish possible effects & relationship of culture on impulse buying behavior (Cakanlar & Nguyen, 2019a; Lee & Kacen, 2008).

Keeping in mind the importance of the field of study for the businesses and academia, this article is dedicated to finding out the patterns of research that have been done to understand consumer impulse buying behavior in cross-cultural context. The analysis of the methodological approaches, models and theories adopted in earlier studies will help in presenting the current state of research on online impulse buying behavior in cultural context.

Thorough analysis of the studies on impulse buying and online impulse buying behavior in cultural context will help to understand the underlying relationship of culture with consumer behavior. The majority of the cross-cultural research studies, carried out in western economies, applying only individualism and collectivism of Hofstede’s cultural indices (Cakanlar & Nguyen, 2019a; Ziada et al., 2020). The research outcomes might not be generalized everywhere and hence there is a need for investigation in other culture as well. There is very little literature available on online impulsive behavior from cross-cultural perspective and further exploration is needed.

The systematic review method was adopted to search relevant articles, to screening and collect the literature, and systematically analyze the existing literature on online impulse buying studies in cultural context to understand and present the current and probable future research direction in this area.

The following objectives will help in achieving the main goal of the study:

• To review impulse buying behavior in cultural contexts.

• To identify and understand different theoretical perspectives for impulse buying behavior in cross-cultural settings.

• To enumerate the research gaps and list out future areas for expansion on impulse buying in cultural contexts.

By accomplishing these objectives, this investigation can help scholars and specialists to more likely comprehend the relationship of the elements of culture that invigorate online impulse buying, hypothetical establishment, and methodological approaches of research. The examination likewise serves to identify the gaps where more exploration is required.

The outcomes additionally empower organizations and strategy makers to detail procedures to fortify competition and increase profits (Rana & Singh, 2021). Moreover, it gives marketers and designers the bits of knowledge nedded to actualize and implement features that fits to a particular culture to improve their business (Singh & Gupta, 2021).

The remaining portion of the paper is organized as follows. In the first place, methodology for systematic review is discussed. Second, we look at the studies conducted using cultural variables that impact consumer behavior in general and impulse buying. Then, we analyze various models of impulse buying based on cultural variables. In next section, the gaps are specified, and a conclusion is made. Finally, the paper lists out the research limitations and suggests headings for additional exploration.

2. Research Methodology

This paper employs a Systematic Literature Review (SLR), which is a form of secondary study that helps in collecting, analyzing, and interpreting available articles in a specific area of research to answer scientific research questions (Kitcharoen, 2004). Several authors have adopted or suggested frameworks to carry out SLR in a particular fashion matching with their research questions and field of study (Abdelsalam et al., 2020; Asghari et al., 2018; Chen, 2017; Fahimnia et al., 2015; John et al., 2019; Ng et al., 2007; Rabbani et al., 2020).

The following methodological approach as shown in Figure 1 is used to search, identify, include/exclude, and analyze articles for the current study.

2.1. Data Search Approach

The data is collected form Scopus, Google scholar, and Microsoft’s database, which are quite comprehensive indexes of scientific literature. The terms like “culture and impulse buying”, “impulse buying in cultural context”, “impact of culture on impulse buying” were used to search the relevant articles in these databases. The articles published between 2000-2020 period were considered. We considered only research article as unit of analysis.

2.2. Inclusion & Exclusion Criteria and Final Sampling

The search is limited to articles written in the English language because of its wide worldwide acceptability as academic language and huge number of publications. There was no restriction on chronology of the articles. A two step search framework was adopted. First, the query on the Scopus database returned 127 articles, which were further analyzed by the authors to check suitability with the field of study and research objectives. Articles which are based on the studies of impulse buying and culture were included, while all other irrelevant studies were excluded in this step. In this step, 89 studies were selected and 38 articles were excluded. Secondly, the specific keywords automatic search on Google scholar and Microsoft academics resulted in 57 articles. Then, all-duplicate studies were excluded by merging the search result and the articles selected in the first step with the help of MS Excel. Further, the authors extensively analyzed these articles from the perspective of the research agenda. The articles written for medical psychology, technological modelling, and other areas which were not having relations with the research questions were excluded. This step excluded 34 articles and included 23. So, finally, 112 articles are considered for further analysis. We classified the studies based on buying behavior, online buying, and impulsive behavior in cultural setting. A tabular representation of the studies describes the author’s name, tittle of the paper, cultural dimensions, and findings.

Figure 1.
Search, inclusion, and exclusion criteria of the articles

3. Results and discussions

3.1. Culture and Impulsive Buying Behavior

The phenomenon of impulse purchases can be described as a situation where quick decisions are made which does not allow the consumer to think rationally and perform an evaluation (Maymand & Ahmadinejad, 2012). During an impulse purchase, a consumer does not spend much time and decides quickly to buy a product or service (Jacqueline et al., 2002). So, we can assume that the quick & short process of finding and evaluating product information is largely influenced by cultural factors (Dameyasani & Abraham, 2013). The cultural differences are of enormous importance for in depth understanding of impulse buying behavior because cultural factors influence the consumers’ overall response towards the products or services (Lee & Kacen, 2008). Consequently, researchers found that there exist differences among countries and people based on their culture that make them to behave in a specific manner as a result of the cultural orientation they have grown up in (Cakanlar & Nguyen, 2019b). The cultural dimensions indices such as power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and collectivism proposed by Hofstede have been studied by researchers to understand impulse buying behavior (Ali & Sudan, 2018; Cakanlar et al., 2019; Dameyasani & Abraham, 2013).

The table details the research tittle, cultural dimensions considered, the methodologies used, the countries considered and their findings. Table 1 exhibits the importance of culture in moderating and shaping consumer impulse buying behavior. Culture plays a very crucial role in the shaping of impulsive buying tendencies both online and offline.

Table 1
Culture and Consumer Impulse Buying Behavior

S. No.	Theme	Cultural Factor(s)	Methodology	Country	Finding	Source
1	Global consumer culture	Individualism and Collectivism	CFA (Confirmatory Factor Analysis), SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	UK	The individualistic are more accustomed to global consumer behaviour and demonstrate more impulse shopping.	(Czarnecka et al., 2020)
2	Store atmosphere	Individualism and collectivism	SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	Brazil and Germany	Emotion significantly & positively affects the impulsiveness of collectivist.	(Barros et al., 2019)
3	Store stimuli	Individualism and collectivism	SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	Pakistan	The impulse purchase behaviour recorded more in the collectivist consumers.	(Miao et al., 2019)
4	Impulse buying	All cultural dimensions of Hofstede	Linear regression	Sweden, Turkey, and Vietnam	The different cultural background influences the consumer impulse buying behaviour.	(Cakanlar & Nguyen, 2019a)
5	Impulse Buying Tendency	All cultural dimensions of Hofstede	CFA (Confirmatory Factor Analysis), Multiple linear Regression analysis	India	The cultural factors are influencing the impulse buying behaviour of the consumers across cultures.	(Ali & Sudan, 2018)
6	Visual Merchandizing	Collectivism	CFA (Confirmatory Factor Analysis), SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	Pakistan	Collectivism did not found significant in influencing impulse purchase behaviour.	(Jalees & Mustaghis-ur-Rahman, 2018)
7	Dimensions of compulsive buying	Individualism, Masculinity, Uncertainty Avoidance, Pragmatism, Indulgence Power Distance	CFA (Confirmatory Factor Analysis), ANOVA and SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	British, Chinese, Czech and Spanish	The compulsive buying behaviour construct is invariant across the different cultural groups	(Eaglen & Schofield, 2017)
8	Transformation Expectations	Heritage	Multi-group structural equation analyses	Thailand and America	The relations between the expectation of transformation and impulsiveness are demonstrated by cultural difference.	(Boonchoo & Thoumrungroje, 2017)
9	Intrinsic factors	collectivism	SEM (Structural Equation Modelling)	India	Collectivism significantly and positively impacts impulse buying	(Badgaiyan & Verma, 2014)
10	Various situations	Individualism and collectivism	Man-Witney test, Binary logistic regression	UK & Taiwan	The UK consumers are buying more on impulse as Taiwanese.	(Ma, 2014)
11	Compulsive buying in developing/developed countries	National similarities and difference	SEM (Structural Equation Modelling), Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)	Russia , Spain ,Netherlands and Turkey	There are more compulsive purchases exhibited by consumers of developing countries than developed economies	(Horváth et al., 2013)
12	Health, affect and self-esteem	Individualist/Collectivist	Two-way ANOVA, Regression analysis	Indonesia and Sweden	The youth exhibited greater impulsivity as of elders in Indonesia, while the convers is true in Sweden.	(Adrianson et al., 2013)
13	Relational collectivism	collectivism	Paired sample t-test and ANOVA	India	Impulsive shopping for relatives such as parents, spouse are more evident in the consumers of collectivist society.	(Khanna & Karandikar, 2013)
14	Symbolic meaning of money	Power distance, collectivism, uncertainty avoidance, Masculinity, symbolic meaning	Multiple linear Regression analysis	Indonesia	Hofstede dimensions and money symbol are influencing impulse buying behaviour significantly.	(Dameyasani & Abraham, 2013)
15	Retail service quality	Individualism and collectivism	Two-way ANOVA	Singapore and USA	Excellent services lead to more impulse purchases and vice-versa.	(Pornpitakpan & Han, 2013)
16	Credit card use	individualism	CFA, MANOVA, MDA and Regression	Korea and USA	The impulse buying behaviour is likely to increase for both national when using credit card.	(Park & Forney, 2004)
17	Shopping Emotion	National similarities and difference	ANOVA, MANOVA and regression analysis	Korea and USA	Two groups differ in their impulse buying nature, Korean students tends to go around, look for options and buy what they need. While American love to buy new fashion apparels.	(Park, 2011)
18	Consumer satisfaction	Individualist/Collectivist	ANOVA	USA, Australia, Singapore, and Malaysia.	Compared to more individualist consumers, more collectivist consumers are likely to be more satisfied with an impulse purchase when another person is present at the time of purchase.	(Lee & Kacen, 2008)
19	Consumer Impulsiveness Trait	Individualist/Collectivist	CFA	Singapore and United States,	Consumers from collectivistic cultures differentiate between the deliberate and involuntary aspects of their impulsive behavior and tendencies, whereas those from individualistic societies are unable or unwilling to make this distinction and for them both these elements merge under a single hedonistic dimension.	(Sharma et al., 2005)
20	Power Distance Belief	Power Distance	Regression analysis	Australia, New Zealand, China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Korea, Japan, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippine, Singapore, Thailand, and Vietnam	There is a link between PDB and impulsive buying as a manifestation of self-control, such that those with high PDB display less impulsive buying	(Zhang et al., 2010)
21	Cultural Orientation on	Individualism and collectivism		USA	Convergent results show that consumers with an independent self-construal tend to have more positive attitudes toward drinking beer and likely to consume more beer. Conversely, consumers with an interdependent self-construal tend to have less positive attitudes toward drinking beer and likely to consume less beer	(Zhang & Shrum, 2007)
22	Cultural Factors	Individualism and collectivism	Z-test and regression analysis	Australia, United States, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Malaysia	Compared to Caucasians, Asians engage in less impulse buying behavior due to trait buying impulsiveness.	(Jacqueline et al., 2002)

• Source: Prepared by Authors.

A study conducted by (Zhang & Shrum, 2009), found that self-construal positively causes impulsive consumption among customers. If a person is present at the time of shopping, it decreases the impulsive consumption tendencies of interdependence while consumption increased for dependent consumers. The availability of money is having direct and significant relationships with impulsive purchasing of consumer across cultures (Dinesha, 2017). In the literature, there is evidence that cultural aspects affect the consumer impulsive purchase behaviour. The factors like normative and social influence (Cakanlar & Nguyen, 2019b), self-indulgence (Sharma et al., 2005), cultural values & lifestyle (Bashir et al., 2013), neuroticism (Miao et al., 2019), extraversion (Badgaiyan & Verma, 2014) and religious values (Danish Habib et al., 2020) are significantly influencing impulsive purchase behaviour.

The following Table 2 represents the models of impulse buying behaviour in a cross-cultural context. The focus of the research, theoretical foundation, research methods etc. of impulse buying behaviour is depicted in Table 2.

Table 2
Models of impulse buying based on cultural factors

Study	Research focus	Theoretical foundation	Research methodology	Sample	Factors
(Verma & Singh, 2018)	To establish a comprehensive model for the antecedents of urges to buy impulsively (UBI) that finally leads to E impulse buying	S-O-R framework	Survey	Indian consumer (223)	website related factors situational factors promotional tools website communication impulse buying tendency
(Jang et al., 2018)	To understand the effects of website quality on online impulse buying with moderating effects of sales promotion and credit card use	S-O-R framework	Survey	Chinese Consumer (1161)	Website Quality Credit Card Use Sales Promotion Online Impulse Buying Behavior
(Adelaar et al., 2003)	To explore the effects of media formats on the emotions and the impulse buying intentions for music compact discs (CDs)	S-O-R framework	Experiment	U.S. students (n=95)	Media format (Text, still images, video) Visual/ verbal preference Emotional response (Pleasure, arousal, dominance) Impulse buying tendency Impulse buying intent
(Atici & Bati, 2010)	To explore how consumer demographic characteristics predict online impulse purchase behaviors in technology products	Not Specified	Survey	Turkish consumers (n=240)	Consumer demographics toward online impulse buying (e.g., gender, age, income)
(Bressolles et al., 2007)	To investigate the effects of electronic service quality on customer satisfaction and buying impulse	Not Specified	Survey	French consumers (n=4109)	Electronic service quality (ease of use, quality and quantity of information, design, reliability and respect for commitments, security and privacy, interactive personalization) Satisfaction Functional buying impulsivity (impulse buying superiority, trust in one’s impulses) Buying impulse
(Brooks et al., 2012)	To investigate web features that mitigate online impulse purchasing	Distraction -conflict Theory	Experiment	U.S. students (n=237)	Perceived enjoyment Urge to buy impulsively Distraction Interruption
(Chih et al., 2012)	To examine individuals’ internal factors of online buying impulsiveness	Not Specified	Survey	Taiwan consumers (n=364)	Hedonic consumption needs Impulsive buying tendency Positive affective Normative evaluations Buying impulsiveness
(Dawson & Kim, 2009)	To investigate the effects of external and internal trigger cues of online impulse buying	Consumption impulse formation enactment (CIFE) model	Experiment	U.S. female students (n=300)	External trigger cues of impulse buying (sales, promotions, ideas, suggestions) Internal cues of impulse buying (cognitive and affective states) Impulse buying tendency Normative evaluation Consumption impulse Online impulse purchase decision
(Drossos et al., 2014)	To study the dimensionality of the product involvement construct and its effects on consumers’ impulse purchase intentions	Elaboration likelihood model	Experiment	University student (n=636)	Affective product involvement Cognitive product involvement Impulse buying tendency
(Dutta et al., 2003)	To examine the effects of website characteristics (usability, feedback, and rehearsal) on consumer impulse purchase decisions	Psychology of mental budgeting	Experiment	U.S. students (n=172)	Feature of online payment process (usability, feedback, rehearsal) Recall of past experience Posting expenses to mental accounting Impulse buying
(Floh & Madlberger, 2013)	To test the effects of virtual atmospheric cues on online Impulse buying behavior and spending	S-O-R framework	Survey	Did not specify (n=508)	Atmospheric cues (e-store content, e-store design, e-store navigation) Shopping enjoyment Impulsiveness Browsing Impulse buying Impulse buying expenditure
(Gwee & Chang, 2013)	To investigate the social influences in affecting impulse purchase behaviors	Not specified	Survey	Asian university students (n=98)	Informational social influence Normative social influence Cognitive impulse behavior Affective impulse behavior Product type (Hedonic vs. Utilitarian) e-Loyalty
(Gwee & Chang, 2014)	To study the use of persuasive claims by marketers in affecting impulse purchase	Heuristics information processing	Experiment	Asian university student (350)	Scarcity claim Popularity claim Need for uniqueness Desirability Impulse purchase
(Eric Hostler et al., 2012)	To illustrate the impact of recommendation agents on unplanned online consumer purchase behavior	Not Specified	Experiment	U.S. university students (n=251)	Use of recommendation agent Product promotion effectiveness Product search effectiveness Customer satisfaction with website Unplanned purchase
(Shen & Khalifa, 2012)	To study the relationship between system design characteristics and online impulse buying.	S-O-R framework	Experiment	Hong Kong university students (n=151)	System effect (interactivity, vividness) Presence (telepresence, social presence) Emotional responses (pleasure, arousal) Buying impulse Value perception Impulse enactment
(Liu et al., 2013)	To study how the website cues affect personality traits to urge the impulse purchase online	S-O-R framework	Survey	Chinese university students (n=318)	Product availability Visual appeal Website ease of use Impulsiveness Normative evaluation Instant gratification Urge to buy impulsively
(Wells et al., 2011)	To investigate the impacts of website characteristics on consumers’ urges to buy impulsively	S-O-R framework	Experiment	U.S. university students (n=264)	Task-relevant cues Mood-relevant cues Perceived usefulness Perceived enjoyment Urge to buy impulsively
(Fan & Zhang, 2015)	To investigate effects of consumers’ cognitive beliefs on online impulse buying	Technology acceptance model	Survey	U.S. university students (n=294)	Perceived ease of use Perceived usefulness Web use Subjective norms Intention Impulsiveness Purchase

• Source: Prepared by Authors.

From the above table it is evident that most of the researchers have adopted the S-O-R framework as a theoretical foundation and survey methods for getting the responses of the respondents. Web sites related factor is the most researched factors and considered in almost every studies. The visual appeal via web atmospherics and visual merchandising have been found to be another important factor in stimulating the impulse buying online. The payment methods, ease of navigation, and security, also positively influences online impulse buying. Online recommendations and reviews of the fellow purchasers are of enormous importance and help web retailers to establish credibility among their potential buyers.

Cross-cultural research has attracted scholars across disciplines from last two decades. The proliferation of internet, super growth of e-commerce business, and consumer orientation of many societies offers tremendous opportunities for impulse purchase revenue for international marketers. However, very little has been done to summarize the studies and present their findings in a conducive way. The current review is an attempt to analyse and list out the importance of culture in understanding global impulse buying behaviour.

These studies show that culture is instrumental for an understanding of consumer behaviour, and it prominently influences the consumer impulse purchase behaviour. (shown in Table 2). Hence, marketing strategies should be developed considering the cultural impact on consumer reactions. The impulsiveness of the consumer depends on many factors, such as emotional state, impulsiveness traits, mood, normative evaluation, self-identity, demographic factors, etc. All these factors are being influenced by culture and cultural theories are offering interesting and important insight about these factors, which are directly or indirectly linked to consumer impulse buying behaviour.

Most of the studies applied cultural dimensions proposed by Hofstede as shown in Table 1 and 2. Very few studies have used all the dimensions of national culture as proposed in Hofstede cultural framework. The majority of the analysis have been done considering either one or two factors i.e. collectivism/individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance etc.

Majority of research studies carried out on the consumers of United States, Great Britain, and few on South African & Chinese consumers. Almost all the studies considered primarily individualism/collectivism to understand the consumer impulsiveness trait, as these economies are individualistic at large.

There is very little research available on the online impulse behaviour in a cross-cultural setting. Online impulse buying is revenue puller for the firms operating across cultures. Therefore, the marketers need to have deep insight about the interplay between culture and online behaviour in term of impulsiveness. In addition, the marketers need to understand the role of website quality and its personalisation in creating urges to purchase impulsively.

4. Discussion

This extensive systematic literature review unfolds the following facts about the impulse buying literature in cross-cultural context. The importance of impulse buying is evident from the fact that a major portion of revenue of a company is coming from impulse purchases. However, its complex nature of consumer behaviour always attracted scholars to understand its unique features to decide on intimating impulse marketing mix. The researchers have given their attention to unfold the underlying phenomenon of impulse buying behaviour (Cakanlar & Nguyen, 2019b; Dameyasani & Abraham, 2013). Culture plays an important role in deciding the consumer behaviour towards a particular product or service. The studies on the influence of culture in online and offline impulse buying have offered the following insights.

First, the maximum of existing literature on this subject is in offline context. The researchers have undertaken the studies to understand the direct, mediating, and moderating role of culture in shaping consumer behaviour, especially impulse purchase. Studies such as one conducted by (Kacen & Lee, 2002) explained the interplay of culture with a consumer urge to buy impulsively that leads to impulsive buying behaviour. However, these studies are conducted by considering only few cultural factors (individualism/collectivism). These studies overlooked the other important factors which has been found instrumental in catalysing the urge to buy and intention to purchase (Bashar, 2020).

Second, these studies are truly offline, the authors did not come across any literature that analysed the influence of culture on online impulse buying behaviour. The results of offline research cannot be generalised to online context. The online impulse buying behaviour is governed by e-commerce websites and the role of website quality and security are very crucial components of the buying behaviour. So, the websites need to be highly localised and personalised to suit the local cultural meanings and symbols. Another important aspect of online behaviour is security in transaction, studies have revealed that majority of consumers are having security concerns while transacting in online space.

Third, the systematic review of literature reveals that the research methods employed in impulse buying research is mixed methods. Experimentation and surveying are found the most used methods while S-O-R (Stimulus-Organism-Response) is the major research framework adopted in the impulse buying literature. The studies are quite a significant contribution in impulse buying research literature that helps in understanding the phenomenon and its important antecedents such as visual merchandising in offline space, website quality in online context, sales promotion, personal factors etc.

Finally, the results add to the understanding of the impulse buying behaviour and the unique role of culture that shapes consumer impulse buying behaviour. Various impulse buying models shows the antecedents of urge to buy impulsively and cultural interplay while leading this urge to impulse buying behavior.

5. Implications

This article has various implications for both academicians and practitioners. The analysis revealed that culture plays an instrumental role in shaping the impulse buying behaviour. Very few studies found on online impulse buying in cultural context. This systematic literature review has focussed on revealing and gaining a deep understanding of the antecedents and its relationship with impulse buying behavior. This study fills this gap by looking at the impulsive buying research literature conducted in cross-cultural context. The scholars can apply the understanding of the traditional impulse i.e. in-store/offline buying concepts in online settings in a cross-cultural framework. Hofstede dimensions and its indices are quite useful in exploring the cross-cultural consumer behaviour. This study will help the researchers to study and model the other aspects of consumer behaviour, especially in cross-cultural context.

The study offers perspective insights for international marketing strategists and top decision makers to gain insight about applicability of culture in global marketing context. The needs, wants, and demands of the consumers are varying drastically from one culture to another, and it is needed to be addressed appropriately to attract, engage, and transact with the prospective customers. For instance, a consumer exhibits entirely different behaviour in-group (collectivist society) and at individual difference levels (individualist society). Similarly, the interaction of situational variables (time, money, availability) in a specific culture and its influence on consumer impulsiveness is different in different cultural contexts. These insights will enable the strategist to design successful international marketing campaigns and offerings in line with the cultural expectations and acceptability of the consumers. This article offers insights for practitioners that will help in comprehending the unique features of culture and its diversity that in turn can be applied for successful marketing strategies that can help them to induce more impulse purchases.

6. Limitations and scope for the future studies

Few limitations should be considered while applying the insights of the study. First, the database used is limited to Scopus index, and the set of articles that matched with the keywords criteria. Only articles are considered for the analysis, there might be additional quality knowledge available in sources like books, magazines, commercial papers that are not included in the study. In addition, this review included only the papers that have explicit relationship with culture; implicit underlying relationship has not been considered that may affect the generalizability of the result in a specific cultural set-up. Second, our analysis is largely focused on understanding the influence of cultural factors on impulse behavior, while there might be other factors as well which moderate or mediate the relationship between cultural factors and impulsive buying. Third, the quality assessment of literatures is done in accordance with the predetermined criteria by the authors and excluded/included based on manual content analysis, certain studies not clearly inferring the relationship might be missed by the authors. Finally, the cross-cultural impulse buying models are investigated to understand the relationship between culture and its underlying variables, study was limited to research models that have culture as dominant variable. There might be important models of consumer impulse buying not included because either it does not consider culture as antecedents or influencing variable.

The literature analysis offers interesting areas of research in the field of impulse buying behavior in cross-cultural context. First, the exponential growth & expansion of e-commerce and its adoptability by consumer is driving an urgent need to understand the online impulse buying behavior across culture. The scholars can explore the antecedents of online impulse buying behavior such as website quality, sales promotion, personal factors, demographic factors etc. in cross-cultural scenario. Second, the role of website personalization according to specific cultural norms can be investigated to discover underlying factors that create impulse buying intentions. Third, most of the methodologies of the literatures, based on both survey and experimental research design, these methods have its own shortcomings, and pose difficulty in determining actual consumer response and subsequent analysis. Researchers can employ a combination of methods or a neurophysiological framework to conduct studies and arrive at results, which may be more accurate and inferential in this subject of online impulse buying behavior. Fourth, the studies on impulsive buying from cultural perspective are prominently conducted in western countries, the outcomes may not be applicable to other cultures, and the scholars can modify and retest the existing impulse buying models in other cultures that will help in the better understanding of impulse buying behavior. Finally, S-O-R framework is widely used in this field of research, other theoretical models needed to be applied and tested empirically. Additional effort is required to explore the precursors of impulsive behavior in various cultures that may help in development of a theoretical foundation that can be applied for cross-cultural research.

7. Conclusion

Impulse buying in a cross-cultural context has attracted attention from scholars due to the availability of tremendous opportunities in global market. In this article, the authors systematically review the literatures on buying behavior, online buying behavior and impulsive buying behavior. The study offers a) review of impulse buying behavior in a cultural context, b) identification and understanding of different theoretical perspectives for studying impulse buying behavior in a cultural setting and c) enumeration of the research gaps with suggestions for further exploration of impulsive buying behavior from cultural prospective. This review analysis discovered that online impulsive behavior is not much investigated in cross-cultural context. These insights of the review study shall enable researchers and practitioners to comprehend the phenomenon of impulse buying in cross-cultural setting. Few implications for the practitioners and mangers are discussed with appropriate example. This article will add to the existing knowledge and will help to design better strategies to instigate the impulse buying behavior in cross-cultural context.

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Edited by

Editor Chefe:

Talles Vianna Brugni - 0000-0002-9025-9440

Editor Associado:

Emerson Mainardes - 0000-0003-2525-275X

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  17 July 2023
• Date of issue
  Jul-Aug 2023

History

• Received
  02 Feb 2022
• Reviewed
  12 Apr 2022
• Accepted
  21 May 2022
• Published
  21 June 2023