India is Best

Literature Review
Consumer decision-making style refers to the mental orientation or approach a consumer has towards making choices. Although, consumer decision-making style represents a relatively consistent pattern of cognitive and affective responses, national culture has been proven to significantly impact on individual values and attitudes, thus culture is expected to have a significant influence on consumer decision-making style (Desmond Lam 2007).
National culture refers to the homogeneity of characteristics that distinguish human groups in terms of norms, values, and institutions. We adopt Hofstede’s framework for two main reasons. First, from a theoretical point of view, this framework is particularly relevant for this study given Hofstede’s focus on underlying values that drive attitudes and attitudinal and behavioural aspects that underlie consumer decisions to remain committed to a brand. Second, the use of Hofstede’s framework is consistent with prior brand research exploring national culture influences.
Hofstede specifies five national culture dimensions: individualism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance, masculinity, and long-term orientation. Research consistent with Hofstede’s approach employs culture at the nation-state level, thereby linking national culture to country. Although Hofstede denotes five dimensions of culture that can provide insights into each country’s values and norms, to maintain parsimony in the theoretical explication of the relationships under study, we test the moderating effect of only those dimensions that are theoretically linked to the four antecedents of brand commitment presented here or that have received previous empirical support. Therefore, this study does not include Hofstede’s dimensions of masculinity (i.e., separation of emotional and social roles of gender within a society) and uncertainty avoidance (i.e., a person’s attitude toward risk).
Individuastic versus Collectivist culture: This dimension refers to the degree to which individuals are intrinsically integrated into groups. Individualistic cultures have ties between individuals as lose bonds and individuals are expected to look after themselves and their immediate responsibilities. Such cultures find that individuals tend to act, think and perform individually as opposed to collectively as part of a group. Collectivist cultures tend to find individuals naturally cohesive and part of groups and individuals tend to act and perform in collective manners and for the good of collective referent groups.
Power distance: Power distance is a scale of dependence on relationships in a cultural context (Hofstede, 1991). In small power distance countries, there is a limited dependence of subordinates on bosses; instead interdependence is preferred in that the subordinate consults with the boss. In contrast, in countries with high power distance, there is considerable dependence of subordinates on bosses, and the subordinates respond by either preferring dependence (paternalism) or rejecting it entirely (counter-dependence).

Individuals with high levels of self efficacy are likely to have higher belief in their own ability to make new products, processes and changes happen and accordingly may function as highly innovative employees or be more likely to be the force driving an innovative workplace culture. However, previous studies have indicated that an individual’s cultural background impacts how personality traits are exercised practiced and manifested (Steenkamp, Hofstede, and Wedel, 1999). Cultural dimensions have gained importance as researchers as well as organizations have become sensitive to the impacts that cultural background can play in positively or negatively impacting the realization of desired behaviours and outcomes. Accordingly, this research studies culture as an important dimension which moderates the relationship being investigated.
Brand management is a complex set of activities that involve managing relationships with customers and other stakeholders, while accounting for a firm’s own past actions and reputation and competitors’ actions, in an effort to build a strong image that wins consumers’ commitment to a product or a line of products (Shocker, Srivastava, and Ruekert 1994). Keller (1993) argues that companies use brands to establish deep relationships with their customers. More of note is the argument that it is through brand management decisions related to brand elements that firms relate to consumers. Two theoretical perspectives are relevant to understand how managers can influence consumers’ perceptions of their brands to increase brand commitment.
First, the principle of self–brand connections has gained wide acceptance in the literature (Chaplin and John 2005; Kleine, Kleine, and Allen 1995). Prior research has demonstrated that people choose brands that are congruent with their self-concepts (Chaplin and John 2005; Muñiz and O’Guinn 2001; Schau, Muñiz, and Arnould 2009; Wallendorf and Arnould 1988). For example, Bhattacharya and Sen (2003, p. 76) even go so far as to suggest brand–self connections as the basis for “meaningful relationships that marketers are increasingly seeking to build with their customers.” The process of self–brand connections is based on people’s comparison of their own defining characteristics, such as values and preferences, with characteristics that define a brand (Chaplin and John 2005; Escalas and Bettman 2005). For example, consumers who define themselves as being innovative are likely to connect with brands that they view as being focused on innovation.
Second, exchange theory argues that people are more likely to reciprocate when an exchange partner is perceived as having made equivalent contributions to the relationship (Bagozzi 1975; Deutsch 1985). The notion of restricted exchange draws attention to a brand’s capability to respond to the concerns of its customers as individual people (Bhattacharya and Sen 2003). For example, if the brand is viewed as being focused on customer needs, individual customers will view the brand as being more involved and thus will reciprocate in kind. Furthermore, the notion of general exchange suggests that people also value a brand’s involvement in socially beneficial activities, thus pointing attention to a brand’s socially responsible activities (Klein and Dawar 2004; Sen and Bhattacharya 2001). Therefore, an examination of customer–brand relationships needs to consider variables relevant to generalized exchange and dyadic transactions.
Drawing from these two theoretical foundations, we develop a general framework that identifies four brand management elements that serve as antecedents to brand commitment: brand innovativeness and brand self-relevance (which refer to the perceived image of a brand that consumers use to establish self-connections) and customer orientation and social responsibility (which refer to the way the consumers perceive the restricted and general exchange with the brand). In addition to these brand management elements, we account for the influence of national culture, a factor that has substantive influence in brand activities (Cayla and Arnould 2008; Guzman and Paswan 2009).
In rapidly changing societies, brands can take on disparate cultural values and may even be central to how these disparate cultural values are being evaluated. The meaning attached to a brand name at any given moment in time is largely dependent on the cultural values brought up in the specific usage or evaluation situation. For marketers, it becomes a difficult task to control the image the brand will have in the marketplace. McDonald's does not always represent Westernization to the consumer, for instance. The interaction is a bit subtler than that, with some people using the brand to uphold traditional ways of interacting in some situations. (Eckhardt and Houston 2002)
By analyzing brands at varying scales of social and cultural context, managers can accommodate other identity issues that are critical to the development of successful brands. For example, brand managers must broaden their narrow focus on developing relationships between their brands and local target segments because brands are now fundamentally woven into the fabric of global consumer culture. We argue that brands are part of the fabric of popular culture and populate our modern mythology; they must be analyzed as cultural forms, carriers of meaning, and devices structuring thought and experience. This cultural dimension of brands cannot be easily captured by prevailing psychological and economic approaches. (Julien Cayla and Eric J. Arnould 2008)