大陸電視購物的特點與前景

TV Home Shopping in China: Cultural Considerations

電視購物的興起是大陸廣告營銷領域的最新發展之一。儘管這個新興產業問世不過兩年，它已經引起了國內外營銷商的很大興趣。一些國際營銷商認為，由於中國消費者眾多，電視普及率日益增長，消費水平明顯提高，電視購物是個很有潛力的市場（Chen,1996）。對很多消費者來說，足不出門，看電視了解產品信息，電話定購自己喜愛的產品，可謂十分方便。然而，電視購物涉及到不同的訂貨、付款和送貨方式。更為重要的是，消費者決定是否購買一個商品，全憑電視中的產品介紹，無法親手接觸實物。電視購物的這些特點決定，其發展不僅依賴於一個社會的電視、電話、信用卡和郵遞系統等基礎設施的發展，而且在很大程度上，取決於消費者的心理適應（Li,1995）。大陸具備這些必要的基礎設施嗎？目前消費者的價值觀念與心理特點是促進還是阻礙電視購物的發展？大陸電視購物的前景如何？本文將就上述問題進行初步的探討與分析，並結合美國電視購物的經驗，提出一個電視購物跨文化研究的基本模式。

The emergence of TV home shopping in China is one of the latest advertising developments in one of the fastest growing markets in the world and has generated interest among both domestic and international mardeters. This paper makes the first attempt to describe the characteristics of TV home shopping in China, analyze the status of the communication and transaction infrastructure and discuss the cultural values of Chinese consumers and their influences. TV home shopping in China is indeed young in terms of its programming, products, positioning and customer services but it has improved rapidly. Recent expansions of China's communication and transaction infrastructure including television, household telephone, credit cards, and goods delivery systems constitute high potentials for the TV home shopping business. The success of TV home shopping will largely depend on the consumer acceptance. Some cultural values serve as facilitating factors while other serve as impeding factors for this new business. The former include 'declination to risk-taking,' 'seeing is believing' and 'thrifty' while the latter include 'materialism,' 'Westernization' and 'status-consciousness.' An interaction of these two types of factors will determine the consumer acceptance. The paper integrates these economic, technological and psychological factors into a micro research model in which intercultural empirical studies could be framed.