Cross-border e-commerce mainly faces overseas consumers. Understanding the types of overseas consumers and their lifestyles is very meaningful for product positioning, branding and the selection of distribution channels.
Lifestyle Research
The consumer’s own situation, life experience, values, attitudes and expectations are called lifestyle. It will affect consumers’ needs and purchasing attitudes, and ultimately affect consumers’ purchasing and usage behaviors.
However, as consumers, few people can clearly understand the role of lifestyle in their commodity purchasing process, but lifestyle does play an indirect and unconscious role in motivating and guiding consumers in their purchasing process.
Currently, the research on consumer lifestyle mainly includes A10 architecture and VALS architecture.
(I) A10 Framework
Scholars Wind and Green proposed the description and measurement method of consumer lifestyle in 1974, mainly focusing on the activeness or passivity of consumer activities, the process and purpose of interest generation, and the emotional cognition and opinions of attitudes, to measure a person’s activities (Activity), interests (Interest) and opinions (Opinion), thus generating the AI0 variable. Later, scholar Plummer proposed the AI0 scale in 1974, and on this basis, combined demographic variables to form four major dimensions, which improved the practicability and application value of lifestyle research. Based on this scale, many derivative scales and research methods were developed later.
Looking at various scales, they generally include the following factors:
Attitude: mainly evaluates about others, channels, ideas and products.
Values: mainly evaluates beliefs about what can be accepted or what is desired.
Activities and interests: mainly evaluate what non-professional behaviors consumers spend their spare time on.
Statistical variables: mainly understand the gender, age, education level, income level, occupational status, family structure and other aspects of consumers.
Media form: mainly evaluate the specific media used by consumers.
Product usage rate: mainly evaluate the consumption frequency of consumers in specific product categories.
Affected by many factors such as politics, culture, and beliefs, there are great differences in purchasing attitudes and behaviors among consumers in different countries. Therefore, understanding and analyzing the lifestyles of cross-border consumers is particularly important for cross-border trade.