Psychological Considerations on Car Designs -An Investigation of Behavioral and Perceptual Aspects Using Eye

Tracking and Cross-Cultural Studies

DISSERTATIONof the University of St. Gallen,

School of Management, Economics, Law, Social Sciences

and International Affairsto obtain the title of

Doctor of Philosophy in Management

submitted by

Christian Purucker

from

Germany

Approved on the application of

Prof. Dr. Andreas Herrmann

and

Prof. Dr. Torsten Tomczak

Dissertation no. 4038

Difo-Druck GmbH, Bamberg 2012

Article I

Purucker, C., Landwehr, J. R., Sprott, D. E., & Herrmann, A. (in press). Clustered Insights: Improving Eye Tracking Data Analysis Using Scan Statistics. International Journal of Market Research.

The definitive version of this paper is available at http://www.ijmr.com/

Article IV

15

States in the process (not involved vs. involved) and added them to the models as predictors. As a group level variable, the power distance index (PDI; Hofstede, Hofstede, & Minkov, 2010) was added to capture status-related differences on a cultural level. Furthermore, the brand awareness and psychometric measures as outlined in the previous section were included. We formulated random intercept models of the general form

2[ ]WTP ~ ( , ) for 1,...,i j i i yN X B i n

on the first level and

20 1( PDI , ), for 1,...,j jN j J

on the second level, with i representing the observations per group and j representing the sample group. Relying on random intercept models, we were able to easily control for level differences and particular country biases. Following the literature, various models were calculated, but generally a strong and stable effect for the psychometric variables could not be obtained (cf. Table 1 for an exhaustive example). The restricted model in Table 2 summarizes the most relevant effects, and Table 3 depicts these separated for each of the countries. With respect to the country involved in the product creation process for the advertised original brand car, the involvement of Germany generally lead to a higher WTP, while the involvement of China and the USA did not exhibit this effect. However, this particular effect was only true for both low power distance countries Germany and the United States, while not showing up in the Chinese sample. Brand awareness proved to be a strong predictor across all different samples in Study 1a. Participants stating higher awareness scores for the brand in the advertisement generally displayed a higher WTP.