Cultural differences in online beer marketing: findings from automated attention analysis

The impact of culture on consumer behaviour has been an important research area for decades. The rise of e-commerce prompted the importance of culturally-bound differences between websites. Web designers are compelled to adjust website development to the cultural characteristics of the target audience and to reflect local perspectives. The actual target users are often invited to provide valuable feedback on e-commerce applications. However, user tests are extremely costly and time consuming. Tools for automated web design assessment have only recently been introduced and have provoked debate regarding their ability to simulate human interaction. In this paper, 40 leading beer-brand-related websites from four different groups (countries) are analyzed. The aim of this study is to discover if automated tools predicting user eye activity are able to distinguish between websites from different cultures. The findings indicate that automated tools provide quick and inexpensive results for initial assessment of the website interface, clearly differentiating between websites from different cultural backgrounds, resonating with current literature.