COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS OF BARRIERS TO KNOWLEDGE SHARING FOR POLISH AND UK CONSUMERS

Consumers' knowledge is increasingly becoming an integral and important element in business strategy regardless of the country. A major challenge for enterprises involves removing potential barriers which may hinder consumer knowledge sharing. The purpose of the paper is to identify those barriers. The reported outcomes are the result of a questionnaire survey that yielded responses from 783 Polish and 171 UK-based consumers. The results indicate that the main barriers to consumer knowledge sharing include lack of time, lack of information about opportunities to share knowledge, and lack of interest in sharing knowledge for Polish consumers whilst for UK consumers the most important barriers are reluctance to sharing knowledge and reluctance to give private information. What is more, the principal difference between countries pertains to actual reluctance to sharing knowledge indicating that UK consumers are by far more reluctant than Polish ones.