Abstract
Augmented buying power of East Asian consumers has resulted in increased interest in these markets among exporting countries such as New Zealand. Wine is a particularly promising sector to target as the number of East Asians choosing to drink wine rises.
In order to serve these markets, companies must understand factors influencing consumers’ choices. In the food choice literature, the widely used means-end chain framework and associated semi-structured interview technique value laddering, aims to elicit consumers’ preferred product attributes, the consequences of these attributes for the consumer and the values that underpin these consequences. While there is much literature on value laddering, there is only limited understanding of the feasibility and validity of using this method in a cross-cultural context and there has been almost no exploration of its use in non-Western cultural settings. Given industry interest to increase product sales in East Asia, it was timely to explore the practicalities of employing this method in this context.
The research had two objectives. The first was methodological-driven and was to consider the transferability of the value laddering technique to an East Asian context. The second objective was to understand how consumers in different markets made decisions about wine choice.
Data collection involved intercepting 60 people (20 New Zealander, 20 Malaysian, and 20 Taiwanese) to partake in a value laddering interview about wine choice conducted in the participant’s native language. Following a content analysis of resulting transcripts, a hierarchical value map for each country was produced displaying the aggregate results. Comparisons of the structure and content of the means-end chains were then made across maps.
Objective One results showed that while the value laddering technique could be successfully used to understand East Asian consumers’ values there were a number of cultural-specific issues that arose during the research process. For example, the intercept method was less effective for recruiting East Asians; more effort was required to build rapport with East Asians; and East Asians found it comparatively more difficult to move up the means-end chain ladder to higher levels of abstraction so more prompting was required. A number of culturally specific personal values (such as Harmony which is related to ‘giving face’) that have not yet been accounted for in existing commonly used lists of personal values also emerged.
Objective Two results revealed that the most commonly preferred wine attributes for Taiwanese were ‘Price’ and ‘Sensory Aspects’. These linked to the consequences ‘Financial Considerations’ and ‘Satisfy Senses’ and to the personal values ‘Self Direction’ and ‘Achievement’. For the Malaysian participants, the ‘Sensory Aspects’ of wine was the most important attribute and the value ‘Hedonism’ was the dominant value.
The contributions of this thesis are twofold: Firstly, the study makes a methodological contribution by demonstrating the successful use of value laddering in a non-Western setting. Practical information on the use of the technique in East Asia is provided to assist researchers wanting to use the method in these cultures. Secondly, the study makes a practitioner-orientated contribution, most notably, concrete advice is provided to wine exporters targeting East Asia.