Transcultural Marketing

Marye Tharp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317507482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Because American consumers transmigrate between social identities in expressing their values and affiliations, marketers must apply transcultural marketing methods and offer a cultural values proposition to build long-term customer relationships. This unique book weaves these topics into profiles of 9 influential American subcultures currently shaping their members marketplace choices.

1

Crossing Cultural Borders at Home

Transmigration

In the contemporary United States, your age, address, language and accent, skin color or shape of eyes as well as the music you listen to, how and where you worship, or where you work are the tools with which American consumers construct, communicate, and change their social identities. Rather than lifetime, fixed definitions of who we are, these self-made, chosen identities are built upon a constantly changing foundation of personal characteristics and behaviors. It is a lifetime project, always in flux, never finalized, but frequently expressed in how we spend our money and time.

National borders have become less important than the distinctions we make between “them” and “us.” The groups with which we identify determine our community boundaries. Our Facebook or Twitter friends are spread all over the world; we share language and Internet savvy but no traditional forms of community. Chinese Americans belong to an ethnic Chinese diaspora that spans the world, but they are hyphenated Americans at home. By donning multiple identities, we have become transmigrants, crossing back and forth across cultural borders almost unknowingly.

The purpose of this book is to explain the concept of “chosen” identity and its relationship to the complex roles that products and services play in our lives and to profile significant American consumer subcultures. The techniques of transcultural marketing navigate the sometimes-contradictory expressions of consumer identity in a multicultural society. We highlight specific American subcultures whose members express their identities in their market-space choices (“bricks and clicks”).

Relationships with organizations and their brands constitute a key element in the “identity kit” that people use while shaping their public and private selves. Just as people build and manage their social selves, companies choose their core values and develop strategies for expressing them. Since organizations are not as agile as people are, change is more difficult for them, especially when attempting to build relationships with customers whose self-defining behaviors are in constant flux. Transcultural marketing is a way of developing marketing strategies that allow organizations to transmigrate back and forth across the cultural boundaries created by the value shifts and different groups with which their customers identify.

This chapter underscores the forces shaping our multicultural society. A multicultural society exists where multiple, sometime-conflicting value systems are loosely linked to the chosen social identities of its members. In particular, American individualistic ideals encourage each of us to select ways in which we can both belong and stand out. This topic leads in turn to the key “cultural value systems” whose principles “define” cultural boundaries within the United States. This chapter pays particular attention to the core values of American mainstream culture since it is the foundation shared (to a greater or lesser extent) by all Americans, no matter which other groups they identify with. The chapter closes with a summary and overview of the book presentation plan.

Forces of Change: Stirring up the Melting Pot!

Four forces have converged to stir up our so-called melting pot of American culture: globalization, changing demographics, shifting media economics, and cultural ideals. As a result, we behave more like ingredients in a mixed salad than a soup: We trumpet our differences in the belief that they enrich the whole.

Globalization

Globalization refers to the increasing interconnectivity of national economies composed of businesses, buyers, and other organizations that share products, services, events, ideas, or people. Globalization affects all the other significant change agents—demographic, technological, economic, informational, and cultural. Because of its far-reaching effects, globalization is radically transforming the ways in which we do business and how we construct our personal identities.¹

Let us first explore what it means to live in a “global” world where national boundaries no longer match cultural borders. Geographical closeness and personal contact no longer determine the limits of our knowledge of where we fit in the world. Increasing access to the Internet offers opportunities to find and communicate with any other like-minded persons in whatever way they choose to label themselves. All kinds of media allow us to “know” our counterparts wherever and however they might exist. For example, eHarmony’s long-time promise has been to apply the “science of matchmaking” to finding one’s soul mate. Angie’s List (www.angieslist.com) extends the feedback from one person’s social network on service experiences to a crowd-sourced “social media network of service experiences,” and Kickstarter.com finds angel investors for art projects. Many other online sites are now where we first learn about “others” who are among our global citizenry.

Business people and teenagers have long been cited as “global market segments,” using the criterion that they fit with one another across the world better than within their original cultures.² Through travel, work, global media, and virtual identity on the Internet, we no longer must know people personally to be able to communicate with them and identify them as “just like us.” Even age-cohort groups such as baby boomers, long thought to have distinctive values across national cultures, are globalizing the wish for “the simpler days of the 1950s.”³ In other studies, younger consumers in multiple countries have shown less prejudice against foreign products and services than do their older counterparts. Such trends suggest growing evidence of global consumer segments.⁴ IKEA is a company that sells “a lifestyle that signifies hip design, thrift, and simplicity. For the aspiring global middle class, buying IKEA is a sign of success”⁵ as well as of membership in a global community of brand owners.⁶

Our virtual contacts are immune to traditional cultural and physical barriers, but we are also physically moving across national borders. Immigration, diasporas (widespread dispersal of people from one culture and region to other places), and the ideals of individualism erase the dividing lines that used to distinguish the beliefs of different cultural groups. The fastest-growing racial group in recent censuses has been “multiple racial origins.” The numerous immigrants from Latin America and Asia to the United States are bringing their own cultural experiences to the American mix. As these new groups integrate into American society, “they will further reduce the distance between America and the rest of the world.”⁷

The market spaces (physical and virtual marketplaces) in which we live—where we get our news, information, entertainment, ideas, heroes, rituals, myths, cultural norms, and values as well as goods and services—socialize us into global culture.⁸ It is not that the other cultural agents—schools, government, religion, family, social groups, and peers—no longer have influence. We simply learn new and sometimes alternative lessons coming from our market spaces of ideas, people, and things. We experience alternative value-influences at younger ages, and they add a set of global and popular culture values to our learning about where we fit into our primary American culture.⁹

What is becoming a personal and business necessity is to have both “roots and wings,” as Pascal Zachary, author of The Global Me, argues.¹⁰ His research suggests that those who identify strongly with their “roots” but who use their “wings” to achieve interpersonal and business success are best at adapting to change. Such requirements for success in our global economy enhance our proficiency at crossing back and forth across cultural boundaries.

Immigration, longer lives, and more participation in market-based economies result in our becoming as much strangers from those physically close to us as we are “friends” with people from other countries. To make sense of our places in this global society, we choose to live value-driven lives, full of inconsistency, contrasts, and contradictions. This is not unique to the United States, but it is in full bloom here and is reshaping our business and p...