Consumer Behavior and Culture

Consequences for Global Marketing and Advertising

Marieke de Mooij

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781526471604
• Edition: 3
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: International Marketing
• Index: Business

Marieke de Mooij's new edition of Consumer Behavior and Culture continues to explore how cultural influences can affect consumer behavior. The author uses her own model of consumer behavior to try and answer the fundamental questions about consumption – what people buy, why they buy it and how they buy.

This edition has been updated to include:

• An insight into the different roles of the internet and the growing influence of social media
• An exploration of the various psychological and sociological aspects of human behavior, such as concept of self, personality, group influence, motivation, emotion, perception and information processing
• Updated examples throughout, including millennials as consumers and how the language of consumption can differ across cultures

1 Consumer Behavior Across Cultures

When the Canadian media philosopher Marshall McLuhan¹ coined the concept of the global village, he was referring to Plato’s definition of the proper size for a city – the number of people who could hear the voice of the public speaker. By the global village, McLuhan meant that the new electric media of his time, such as telephone and television, abolished the spatial dimension. By means of electricity, people everywhere could resume person-to-person relations, as if on the smallest village scale. Thus, McLuhan viewed the electronic media as extensions of human beings. They enhance people’s activities; they do not make people the same. If you assume people are the same everywhere, global media extend homogeneity. If you realize that people are different, extensions reinforce the differences. McLuhan did not include cultural convergence in the concept of the global village. In fact, he said the opposite: that uniqueness and diversity could be fostered under electronic conditions as never before.

This is exactly what technological development has accomplished. Contrary to expectations, people have embraced the Internet and other new technology mostly to enhance and intensify their current activities. In the cold climates, where people used to preserve food in the snow, they have embraced deep-freeze technology most intensely. The colder the climate, the more deep freezers. In Korea, where people used to preserve the national dish Kimchi in pots in the ground, they developed a special refrigerator to be able to do this in the home. At the start the mobile phone penetrated fastest in countries that already had advanced fixed telecommunications infrastructures. The number of contacts people have with their friends increased and intensified by social media. It was assumed that the Internet would undermine authoritarian regimes, but in fact it is used to strengthen them. The Internet has not changed people. It has reinforced existing habits that, instead of converging, tend to diverge. There is no evidence of converging consumer behavior across countries. This phenomenon is a core topic discussed in this book that provides evidence of consumer behavior differences that are too large and too stable to ignore.

Technology and national wealth have converged in the developed world to the extent that the majority of people can buy enough to eat and have additional income to invest in new technology and other durable goods. As a result, countries may become similar with respect to penetration of many of such goods, but what people do with their possessions does not converge. Much of consumer behavior varies across borders. As national wealth converges across countries, its explanatory power declines, and mainly cultural variables can explain cross-country differences. Cultural values are at the root of consumer behavior, so understanding culture’s influence is necessary for those who want to succeed in the global marketplace. Culture is pervasive in all aspects of consumption and consumer behavior and should be integrated into all elements of consumer behavior theory. That is what this book attempts to do. This first chapter reviews the assumptions of homogenization and the underlying causes of these assumptions.

Global Consumers in a Global Village?

One of the greatest myths of global marketing is of global consumers living in a global village. In a sense, new communication technology has made the world into a global city or village in which we, in theory, can hear and see everything at any time in any place. The question is whether in practice we do hear and see everything at any time and in any place. And then, even if we do, the core question is whether this makes us similar to each other. Jeremy Bullmore says, ‘In many ways, consumers are growing more alike, and we all know why. Mass communications, travel, multinational companies, the whole apparatus of the global village.’² Because we adopt some consumption symbols, such as jeans and trainers, from people in other parts of the world, the assumption has been that other aspects of our behavior will likewise change. In particular, Western international news journals have made us believe that a homogenization process would work toward universal (American) values. A single youth culture was expected to form across Europe, mimicking a kind of American model because teenagers listen to the same music, surf the net, and talk to each other on their mobile phones.³

Also, in academia the belief is that convergence of technology, global media, increased trade, and travel act to bring people together. In textbooks of international marketing and consumer behavior, there are plenty of statements about convergence of lifestyles and values, but these statements are not accompanied by empirical evidence. Assael,⁴ author of one of the leading textbooks on consumer behavior, states that world cultures are becoming closer in many respects, that tastes in music, fashion, and technology among the young are becoming more similar across the world. With more consumers craving American goods, consumption values abroad are Americanizing. In particular, teenagers across the world have become similar.

As teens across the world watch the same television shows and similar commercials, they begin to develop similar consumption patterns…. Teens in the United States, Europe, Latin America and the Far East find being with friends and watching TV to be the most enjoyable ways to spend time…. Greater travel, better global communications, and increased access to the web have spurred the development of common norms and values among teens worldwide.⁵

Another consumer behavior textbook, by Solomon⁶ suggests

we shape our opinions and desires based on a mix of voices from around the world, which is becoming a much smaller place as a result of rapid advancements in communication and transportation systems. In today’s global culture, consumers often prize products and services that ‘transport’ them to different places and allow them to experience the diversity of other cultures ….

Figure 1.1 Leisure activities of young people in Europe: Percentages who watch TV, meet friends, play sports, attend sports events, or play games for two or more hours on weekdays

Sources: Young Europeans: A Survey Among Young People Aged Between 15–30 in the European Union, Flash EB 202 (2007); Society at a Glance (2016), OECD Social Indicators, OECD Publishing, Paris; Physical Activity Statistics (2015), British Heart Foundation (see Appendix B)

In our local supermarket we can buy blueberries from Argentina, wine from Chile, dates from Israel and kiwis from New Zealand, but that doesn’t make us experience the diversity of the people of Argentina, Chile, Israel or New Zealand. In reality, relatively few people travel to an extent that they get insight into people’s lives in other countries. Few people watch international (English language) television programs regularly. The English language cross-border channel CNN had to introduce national language versions. MTV has localized its content all over the world. The degree of exchange of people is limited, and there is no empirical evidence that global media make consumer behavior converge across countries. Generally people make blogs in their own language and thus limit their audience. Instead of globalization there is a trend of localization. Twitter trending topics are mostly local: about the weather, transport, politics etc.⁷ This applies to most social media. At the start of 2018 with respect to the kind of posts, videos or photos, Facebook decided to start focusing on what people’s friends and families share and de-emphasize content from publishers and brands.⁸ Even across Europe, often thought to be a relatively homogeneous area, how young people spend their leisure time varies. Watching TV and meeting friends are activities of young people everywhere, but the degree to which they do this varies. Whereas 45% of Portuguese youngsters watch TV, only 8% of German youngsters do so. Also in some countries other activities like playing sports are preferred to watching TV or meeting friends. Attending sports events and playing games as leisure activities also vary across countries. Figure 1.1 illustrates some of the differences for 13 European countries.

Globalization and Global Consumer Culture

Globalization is a recurrent theme in the media, often with the focus on its negative effects. People are thought to feel dominated by large multinational corporations more than by their local and national governments. Global trade is supposed to result in a global consumer culture. What are globalization and global consumer culture?

Globalization

According to Robertson,⁹ globalization became a common term in intellectual, business, media, and other circles with a number of meanings and with varying degrees of precision. In 1990 he related the term globalization to modernity and postmodernity. The concept of globalization per se should be applied to a particular series of developments concerning the structuration of the world as a whole. These are the spread of capitalism, Western imperialism, and the development of a global media system. The notion of Western imperialism in particular has linked negative connotations to the term globalization. Critics of globalization tend to protest against an emerging global monoculture consisting of McDonald’s, Nike, Levi’s, Barbie dolls, and American television. Use of the term cultural imperialism suggests a passive consumer who has no free will to withstand the attractive propositions of effective marketing techniques applied by a few American brands.

The definition by Unesco¹⁰ covers this as follows:

Globalization is a process in which the people and the countries of the world are being brought closer together, economically and culturally, through trade, information technology, travel, cultural exchanges, the mass media and mass entertainment. Globalization can be subdivided into three major areas: economic globalization, cultural globalization, and political globalization.

Relevant for this book are economic and cultural globalization. Globalization is largely visualized as a few ubiquitous global brands such as Coca-Cola, McDonald’s, and Nike, and such brands are freq...