The effective role of experiential marketing in the differentiation of brands has been documented in both traditional and online services. The digital context of e-retailing makes it both a suitable platform for experiential consumption (Pine & Gilmore 1999), and an easily accessible shopping method cross-culturally. In line with this notion, we investigate for the first time whether culture impacts the popularity of the experiential values offered on the e-retailing websites for customers. Our suggested model is based on the fact that the desire for experiential benefits is mostly prevalent in the affluent and post-materialist societies (Lorentzen 2009), and is becoming a common consumer trend in (North) American culture (Abrahams 1986). Consumers from more collectivist and pragmatic societies - such as those with Chinese background - on the other hand usually give more importance to utilitarian/functional benefits than to hedonic/experi-ential outcomes (Hirschman 1982; Inglehart and Baker 2000). In this line, the current article investigates for the first time whether the experiential values offered on an e-retailer's website work differently for two cultural groups that are different in their levels of post-modern lifestyles, i.e., North American vs. Chinese e-shoppers. This research also studies whether certain key variables of online shopping - including site involvement and site attitude -would have different influences on website patronage intentions for those two cultural groups.
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