Investigating consumer confusion proneness cross-culturally: empirical evidence from the USA, Germany, and Thailand

Abstract

With ever increasing amounts of marketplace information, decreasing inter-brand differences, and increasingly complex products confusion is becoming a global problem for consumers the world over. Although confusion has been identified as a problem for consumers and marketers in many countries and have not been shown to be cross-culturally valid, most measures of consumer confusion have been developed in western countries, including Walsh et al.'s ( 2007) consumer confusion proneness (CCP) scale, and have not been shown to be cross-culturally valid. Thus, relatively little is known about the cross-cultural differences in confusion proneness. Using the three-dimensional, nine-item CCP scale developed in Germany, this study explores cross-cultural differences in consumer proneness in the United States as well as in Germany and Thailand. The results reveal that some factor loadings of the CCP scale are not invariant across samples and that unique factor structures emerge for the U.S. and Thai samples. The results are discussed as well as the marketing implications.