American companies selling products in Japan and...

American companies selling products in Japan and other Asian countries have long been aware that consumers across the Pacific have different values from people in this country. And a forthcoming book by University of Southern California professor Jagdish Sheth and two co-authors may help to answer the critical question of exactly how they are different.

The new book, called “Why We Buy What We Buy: A Model of Consumption Values,” provides a general theory of consumer desires by slicing up the motives, or values, behind all behavior into five categories. Functional values are associated with quality and price of a product or service; social values relate to the status or identity that can be gained from using a product; emotional values are those related to the pleasure or sensations produced by a product; epistemic values satisfy the sense of adventure and curiosity, and conditional values are those that derive from needs created by some other value.

All buyers, the authors say, are motivated by some mix of these values, and that mix remains constant for an individual consumer no matter what the product or service. And while the value mix will vary across any population, national and cultural differences are even more important than the individual differences, Sheth said.

Japanese consumers, for example, will be more influenced by social and functional values than by epistemic and emotional values, Sheth said. An American cigarette vendor, for example, would therefore be wise to market a given brand as a social symbol.

The next phase of Sheth’s research will systematically study cross-cultural value differences using the five categories.