Consumers' wine selection and the influence of Confucianism

As the cornerstone of the Australian wine industry, the domestic wine market has developed steadily over the past two decades. Immigrants to Australia are an important demographic group who embed gradually into Australian society and are increasingly targeted as consumers by the Australian wine industry. But the domestic market is not homogenous as intra-national diversity (Tung and Baumann, 2009) creates a complex market place in Australia. The number of immigrants from East Asia has increased considerably over the last 10 years. This group typically has strong purchasing power and they are generally open to drinking alcoholic beverages. Research shows that culture influences consumers' attitudes and behavior (Luna and Gupta, 2001), and for East Asians, the Chinese and South Koreans are largely driven by Confucianism. In this study, wine category choice for Chinese and South Korean consumers was probed to establish the impact of their traditional Confucian values on consumer behaviour and then contrasted with Caucasian consumer behaviour. Three purchase motivation scenarios were presented to 511 consumers through a shopping mall intercept involving a questionnaire. The questionnaire was designed to examine and analyse wine category choice for self/household-consumption, social entertainment-use and gift giving. Separate models were developed to distinguish a preference for Australian and French wine. Backward deletion regression analysis was used to arrive at the most parsimonious models and the use of ANOVA with post-hoc analyses established significant differences in Confucianism among the three ethnic groups. This study is unique in establishing the impact of Confucianism on consumers' wine category choice. It also offers a new contribution in creating a concept to measure Confucian values in relation to consumer behaviour, the Confucian Consumer Behaviour Components (CCBC). A comparison of the three research models used in this study, namely the marketing model, the CCBC model and the hybrid model (which combined the marketing model and the CCBC model) finds that the hybrid model has the highest explanatory power for consumers' wine category choice. Implications for academic theory and practice are discussed.