The impact of culture on e-marketing acceptance by Millennials: The Lebanese-Italian case

Millennials, anyone born between 1982 and 2003, are now entering the labour force and are characterized by their own set of characteristics and values. No companies can afford to ignore their growing purchasing power in different countries but few studies have analysed so far the impact of national cultures on e-marketing. To fill this gap, this paper explores Millennials’ attitude towards e-marketing utility perception and its effect on behavioral pattern in a cross-cultural perspective. In particular, we adopted the UTAUT 2 model to analyze Millenials’ e-marketing adoption in Italy and Lebanon. Questionnaires were administered to a sample of Italian (N=167) and Lebanese (N=150) undergraduate students. SmartPLS technique was used to analyze the data. In the Italian sample, Effort expectancy, Facilitating, Trend and Hedonic Motivation significantly predicted Utility perception of emarketing which, in turn, was significantly related to e-marketing adoption. On the opposite, in the Lebanese sample only Price Value and Social Influence predicted Utility perception of e-marketing which in turn was positively related to e-marketing adoption. Our results lead to the conclusion that national cultures still play an important role in affecting emarketing adoption also among younger generations especially in less industrializes and technologically developed countries. Therefore, companies should keep this aspect in mind when developing e-marketing strategies targeting this generation