Why Susceptibility to Interpersonal Influence Ought to Be Used to Segment Consumer Markets

Based on a long-standing tradition of research in the academic marketing literature on Anglo-American consumer susceptibility to interpersonal influence (see e.g., Park & Lessig 1977) we now know what the mean levels of susceptibility are to informational and normative interpersonal-influence in this population. However, unfortunately, in this same literature we know practically nothing about the mean levels of these two types of influence in the African-, Asian-, and Hispanic-American populations in the U.S. This issue is investigated in this paper by assessing the mean levels of these types of influence in comparable samples of African-, Chinese-, Hispanic-, and Anglo-Americans in the U.S. using the measure of Bearden, Netemeyer and Teel (1989). When we compared these four samples on the level of their susceptibility to informational and normative interpersonal-influence, we found the following. Chinese-Americans were far more susceptible and Hispanic-Americans far less susceptible to normative interpersonal influence in comparison with African-, and Anglo-Americans. The latter two groups were roughly comparable on their mean levels of susceptibility to normative interpersonal influence, though there were a couple of indicators of this type of influence where these two groups differed substantially. For informational interpersonal-influence, Chinese-, African-, and Anglo-Americans were equally susceptible. However, Hispanic-Americans were much less susceptible to informational influence than any of these three groups. The rationale for and the ability that we now have (based on these findings), to segment and differentially target African-, Anglo-, Chinese-, and Hispanic-Americans in the U.S., based on their differing levels of susceptibility to both informational and normative interpersonal influence is discussed in this paper.