Ways your religion, culture and even gender affect your buying decisions.

Cultural differences affect consumer’s decisions and behavior. In different parts of the world people have different likes for food, clothes and other products. Cultural differences make the producers change their products and adapt them to the market they are trying to enter. Using different sources including managementstudyguide.com and a “The Impact of Cultural Factors on the Consumer Buying Behaviors Examined through An Empirical Study” article published by Yakup Durmaz, I will try to show you the ways your Religion, Gender and Culture can affect the way of your decision making.

Source: http://www.fubiz.net/

 There are vast differences between distant parts of the world. But, sometimes, differences can appear in nearby countries, or in some cases even in the same country. Even your neighbor can have different preferences when it comes to products.

Culture

 Your culture deeply affects the way you choose products.Culture includes all thoughts, languages, attitudes and materials. It also includes the customs that are characteristic for that area. For example, in Japan, number four is seen as bad luck, so most of products are sold in groups of 3 or 5, just to avoid the number four. It is also stated in Yakup Durmaz’s article: “Another element of culture, tradition, is related with non-verbal behavior of individuals.”. It states that traditions can affect consumers way of thinking. Good example for this is a fact that men in France use more cosmetic products than women, because of their self-conscious tradition, which leads to higher number of cosmetic products specialized for males.

Religion

 Religion also affects your decisions. As stated in an article on managementstydiguide.com website, religious beliefs have deep affection on customers. An example that is very well known and can be applied here is meat choice. Muslim people do not eat pork. Hindu people do not eat beef. And Christians eat both pork and beef. This a great example of how your religion can affect your choice in food buying. This is also why, in countries where for example Muslim population is majority it's hard to find pork, just because of low demand.

Gender

 Your gender plays a major role in your buying decisions. Because some products are separated into male and female categories, they get different attention. This phenomenon is specially present in advertisement. You can rarely, almost never see a woman doing a chainsaw advertisement or a man acting in cosmetics advertisement. As stated in Management Study Guide article, this is because of how differently males and females are perceived.

 So, to sum up, your decisions get affected by different types of factors. Major factor are cultural differences. The cultural differences include Religion, Gender and the Culture itself. Different parts of world have different cultures and therefore people living in different parts of the world choose products differently.

Future research: We will go over next type of factors, Social factors.