SUMMARY
Drawing on the cultural priming paradigm, the purpose of this research is to investigate how cultural differences in cognition affect consumers’ hierarchical cognitive structures underlying wine purchase decision-making process. Means-end chain analyses of French and Korean wine consumers were conducted both at a chronic cultural difference level and at an experimental level in which either analytic or holistic thinking tendency is primed. The results show that the holistic thinking-primed consumers consider broader connections between the key perceptual elements of the means-end chain, resulting in more complex structures of interconnected motives than the analytic thinking-primed consumers. This study provides support for the dynamics of culture-specific thinking styles as the driver of cultural variations in wine consumers’ cognitive complexity in the decision-making process. Important practical implications for international food marketing managers stem from our cross-cultural findings.