Tell me where you come from and I know what makes you tick: Managing the consumer personality-satisfaction link in diverse cultures

Marketing programs that evoke high satisfaction and marketing success in one culture often fail in others, but the understanding of those cultural differences is insufficient. The question of how culture is linked to consumer satisfaction is still not answered satisfactorily. One promising paradigm for exploring such questions comes from progress in cross-cultural personality psychology. Thus, we examine the influence of individual-level cultural orientations on personality, and the role of personality and affect in satisfaction formation across cultures. Based on experimental data, we show that a high individualism orientation triggers higher levels of extraversion; a high uncertainty-avoidance orientation triggers higher levels of neuroticism. Based on field data from Japan, Spain, and the United States, we identify equivalent relationships amongst personality-related antecedent processes shaping satisfaction indicating universality across these cultures. The findings demonstrate the usefulness of cross-cultural personality psychology theory and methods for understanding and predicting consumer responses to marketing actions across cultures.