Cross-Cultural Marketing

Theory, practice and relevance

Dawn Burton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN: 9780415448925
• eBook ISBN: 9781134060160
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Cross-cultural marketing is an important element of the contemporary business environment. Many conventional accounts of the topic have conflated cross-cultural and cross-national marketing, but in this groundbreaking, new book, Burton argues that these generalizations have little meaning given the extent of multi-culturalism in many societies.

Given the importance of new emerging markets in the Far East, Middle East, Asia and Latin America, this book raises important questions about the applicability of existing marketing theory and practice, which was originally developed using the model of Western society. An extensive range of cross-cultural marketing issues is addressed, including:

• Cross-cultural consumer behaviour
• Cross-cultural management practice
• Promotional strategies
• Product development
• Distribution
• Marketing research methods

Cross-cultural Marketing offers a new, more complex and sophisticated approach to the important challenges for existing marketing theory and practice and their continued relevance for stakeholders. As such, it is an invaluable text for students of international and cross-cultural marketing, as well as for practitioners who wish to assess new developments in the field.

1 Dimensions of culture

The focus of this chapter is to explore some of the ways that culture can be analysed within a cross-cultural marketing context. The first task is to define what culture means taking into account historical patterns of thought and the contribution of different countries in arriving at the definitions that we use today. A second theme of this chapter is to explore the notion of national culture. Using the nation as a geographical unit of analysis and equating it with a distinctive culture is widely practised in marketing. Indeed within marketing cross-cultural and cross-national are often used interchangeably in books and research papers. The idea of a national culture is a concept that is of quite recent origin and some would argue is not sophisticated enough to deal with an increasingly culturally complex world. A third theme of this chapter is to assess what has become known as the globalization of culture. The globalization of culture was an idea that gained considerable currency in the 1980s, and refers to the way that global communications networks have resulted in a homogenized world of standardized products, advertising messages, and retail formats. The widespread use of the Internet is exacerbating these tendencies resulting in the globalization culture that supersedes local cultural differences. The fourth theme of the chapter is to consider what has become known as the glocalization of culture. This approach emerged largely as a critique of the globalization thesis which is arguably something of a blunt instrument. Supporters of glocalization maintain that it is still important to engage with differentiated local markets within the context of a globalizing world.

The fifth theme of this chapter is to recognize a trend around the world for countries to become more multicultural in their composition. In some respects the techniques used within the context of international marketing need to be used at home. Equating cross-cultural with cross-national marketing is missing the point, and in so doing is simplifying highly complex ethnoscapes comprising layers of cultural complexity. As ethnicity has become an important aspect of culture within different countries, the task of marketers has been to develop strategies that tap into this market. A sixth theme of this chapter is to engage with the issue of cosmopolitanism. The concept of cosmopolitanism was traditionally associated with well-travelled individuals from advanced nations that revelled in learning about other cultures. However, cosmopolitan consumer culture is also evident in definitions of culture. The final section explores the concept of whiteness and culture.

Definitions of culture

Culture is an incredibly complex concept that has attracted the attention of significant numbers of academics writing about the subject from very different standpoints (Jenks 1993). Some scholars within the field of anthropology have gone so far as to argue that the concept has become so problematic that it should be replaced with something that is more concrete and manageable (Geertz 1973). Raymond Williams has been one of the most prolific writers on the topic of culture documenting its historical roots and changing definitions according to societal conditions (Williams 1983, 1993). In his text Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, Williams traces the historical roots of the word ‘culture’ in several European and Scandinavian countries. Initially, the word derived from cultura that had a range of meanings including ‘inhabit, cultivate, and protect, honour with worship’ (Williams 1983: 87). By the early fifteenth century the French word culture had passed into the English language and the primary meaning was then in husbandry, associated with the tending of natural growth in either crops or animals. From the early sixteenth century the concept of tending to natural growth was extended to human beings.

Culture as a noun was not common before the late eighteenth century. In eighteenth-century England, the term was often associated with civility that acquired social class associations connected to breeding and advantage. Williams cites Herder in his unfinished work entitled Ideas on the Philosophy of the History of Mankind (1784–1791) where he criticized the notion of a superior European culture in the world and referred to cultures in the plural: ‘the specific and variable cultures of different nations and periods, but also the specific and variable cultures of social and economic groups within a nation’ (Williams 1983: 89). Initially the term culture was used to differentiate between national and traditional cultures and subsequently the concept of folk culture. There is also a distinction between definitions of culture as a process of intellectual and spiritual development, and that which focuses on a material way of life of people, periods, groups or humanity in general. A third usage has emerged that refers to intellectual, especially artistic, activity—music, literature, painting and sculpture. Differences in the usages remain in various languages. In the German, Scandinavian and Slavonic language groups, the material production emphasis is apparent, whereas in Italian and French the process of human development dominates.

Cultural studies as an academic discipline is more highly developed in some countries than others, although its history as an academic discipline is highly contested (Werbner 2002; McGuigan 1999; Steele 1999; Carey 1997). It has a long history in Britain and the USA but is of more recent origin in South Africa (Nuttall 2006), India (Mukhopadhyay 2006), and Japan (Tumari 2006) where cultural studies can be traced to the 1980s. In Latin America there were studies of a distinctive Latin American culture in the opening decades of the twentieth century, but the discourse really emerged after the 1970s (Hart and Young 2003). There remain various differences in the usage of the term culture across academic disciplines. For example, in archaeology and cultural anthropology reference to culture, or a culture, is overwhelmingly connected to material production, whereas in history and cultural studies the primary focus relates to ‘signifying or symbolic systems’ (Williams 1983: 91). The cultural studies definition is aptly demonstrated by Tylor ‘culture is that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals, law, custom and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of society’ (1964: 18). Best achievements in the spheres of art, literature and music became defining features of what constituted refinement, grace and civilization. In their review of twenty years of cross-cultural research, Sojka and Tansuhaj found that scholars rarely defined the term culture in order to clarify the concept. They provided their own definition ‘a dynamic set of socially acquired behaviour patterns and meanings common to members of a particular society or human group, including the key elements of language, artefacts, beliefs and values’ (Sojka and Tansuhaj 1995: 469). Geertz (1995: 42) describes cultures as ‘many ways of “doing things”, distinct and characteristic’. While Appadurai (1996: 13) stresses the dimensionality of culture when he notes ‘culture is less a property of individuals and groups and more a heuristic device that we can use to talk about difference’. He concedes that not all differences are of a cultural nature, and suggests that differences that ‘either express, or set the groundwork for the mobilization of group identities’ should be included’.

The meaning and nature of culture is contested in marketing as it is in other disciplines (Arnould et al. 2004: 74) refer to a society’s culture as ‘dynamic blueprints for action and interpretations that enable a person to operate in a manner acceptable to other members of the culture’. However, it needs to be recognized that culture is indeterminant and therefore not fully predictable, it can also be subject to changes over time. They argue that blueprints of action are split into two parts: cultural categories and cultural principles. Cultural categories ‘define and organize time, space, nature, the sacred and society’ (75). For example, occupation, social class, caste, gender, ethnicity, and age are examples of cultural categories. Others include social categories such as families, temporal categories, for example the distinction between work and leisure, and natural and sacred categories that delineate between what is considered cleanliness and filth in different cultures. Cultural principles ‘allow things to be grouped into cultural categories, ranked and interrelated … values, ideals, norms and beliefs’ come into this category (77).

Much of the research in marketing centres on understanding cultural values. Values can be instrumental values that are shared beliefs about how people should behave. Or alternatively, they can be terminal values, for example desirable life goals (Arnould et al. 2004: 82). There have been several attempts by marketers to identify core values across societies, and those values that differ between and are a result of ‘local’ cultural differences. Particularly influential in marketing has been the work of Hofstede, although it has not been without controversy. Hofstede’s work along with others that have attempted to identify cross-cultural value systems are critically evaluated in Chapter 9. Another value that marketers have been interested in is ethnocentrism, which is a belief that one’s own culture is better/ superior than that of another cultural group. This concept has been used extensively to understand consumer attitudes to products from other countries/cultures.

While much of the work in marketing has focused on the importance of values, societies also possess myths and symbols that are an integral part of their culture. Myths are stories such as legends and fairy tales that are passed on from one generation to the next. Urban legends are stories that are supposed to be true but are fictitious, or at least there is some uncertainty about their authenticity. Myths and legends often have a symbolic and moral function, such as ‘no good comes of nasty people’. Cultural symbols are objects that have a powerful significance within different cultures and they can have multiple meanings. For example, a national flag is something that binds people together. Marketers can use these symbols to promote products and services; for example, French wines and cheese are often stamped with a copy of the national flag. A final aspect of culture highlighted in marketing are rituals. Cultural rituals are behaviours that occur in a fixed order and tend to be repeated on a regular basis. Rook (1985) has distinguished between many types of ritual behaviour, including grooming (beauty products and services like spas), disinvestment (disposing of products, for example car boot sales), exchange rituals (gift giving at Christmas), and possession rituals where products are moved from the market to the home where they are consumed.

National culture

Considerable attention in marketing is given to the concept of national culture. The concept that nations have distinctive cultures is unproblematically accepted in cross-cultural research designs. Cross-national marketing looks at the responses of individuals in one country and compares them with another. The differences are usually attributed to national cultural differences. However, this approach to assigning to the nation a particular culture is not universally shared, and, more to the point, this way of thinking about culture is relatively recent in origin. A rather different perspective is that cultures are interconnected and exchange materials, thus no culture is due to the authorship of one group of people. Rather, ‘cultures need to be studied in all their plurality and particular historicity, including their interconnectedness’ (Wolf 1994: 5). The purpose of this section is to unpack the term of national culture and to consider how it evolved, the different ways that it has been used, and how plausible it is to continue this tradition.

Miroslave Hroch (1996: 61) describes the nation as a ‘large social group integrated not by one but by a combination of several kinds of objective relations (economic, political, linguistic, cultural, religious, geographical, historical) and their subjective reflection on collective consciousness’. In order to successfully build a nation three central features are required:

• a ‘memory’ of some common past, treated as ‘destiny’ of the group—or at least of its core constituents;
• a density of linguistic or cultural ties enabling a higher degree of social communication within the group than beyond it;
• a conception of the equality of all members of the group organized as a civil society.

(Hroch 1996: 61)

Nationalism, the ideology that supports nation states, is historically contingent since it is linked to political intervention, the emergence of new ideologies and cultural change that manifests itself in new social identities. In some instances, nationalist movements directed at aligning the boundaries of the state and nation have employed or induced violence as in the case of Algeria, Basque Country (in Spain), Northern Ireland, Serbia, Somalia and Vietnam (Laitin 1999). In his text Nation and Narration, Bhabha (1990) argues that the notion of a static national culture that can be easily measured is flawed, since much of what constitutes the nation is at the level of discourse rather than practice. In his essay entitled ‘What is a nation?’ Ernest Renan (1990) argues that the concept of a nation is relatively new.

Antiquity was unfamiliar with them; Egypt, China and ancient Chaldea were in no way nations. They were flocks led by a Son of the Sun or by a Son of Heaven. Neither in Egypt nor in China were there citizens as such. Classical antiquity had republics, municipal kingdoms, confederations of local republics and empires, yet it can hardly be said to have had nations in our understanding of the terms.

(Renan 1990: 9)

A similar point is made by Laitin (1999) when he observes that states in the precapitalist period were multinational, and the boundaries were dictated by dynastic marriages, wars, and geographic convenience. The culture of the population within those somewhat arbitrary boundaries was of little interest to either leaders or the population at large. This situation changed with the advent of capitalism which fostered notions of individual citizenship and distinctions between different social classes. The ruling classes were pressed to legitimate their position of power and did so by inventing symbols that represented the common culture of the people in the form of a common language, ancestry, and territory. Hobsbawm (1990) suggests that as a consequence of this process nations are ‘invented’ or ‘imagined’ (Anderson 1983). Renan (1990) notes that the boundaries of nations are not dictated by language, geography, race, religion or anything else but are made by human will, it is a soul, a spiritual principle based on large-scale solidarity relating to what sacrifices one has made in the past and is prepared to make in the future.

Brennan (1990) has focused on what he refers to as the ‘myths of the nation’. He argues that this concept is potentially confusing since it can offer multiple meanings and include ‘myth as distortion or lie, myth as mythology, legend, or oral tradition; myth as literature per se; myth as shibboleth—all of these meanings are present at different times in the writing of modern political culture’ (Brennan 1990: 44). Raymond Williams (1983) has explored the relationship between the use of the nation to make specific reference to the modern nation state, and the more general historical use of the term ‘natio’ as denoting local community, family, domicile and a wide condition of belonging. He maintains that the two need to be distinguished.

‘Nation’ as a term is radically connected with ‘native’. We are born into relationships which are typically settled in a place. This form of primary and ‘placeable’ bonding is of quite fundamental human and natural importance. Yet the from that to anything like the modern nation-state is entirely artificial’.

(Williams in Brennan 1990: 45)

The myths and popular symbols that are exported to economic and military dominions are powerful indicators of the culture of a country. An important vehicle in this respect was the novel that documented social life and presented the characteristics that imaged the community as nation. Johnson (1995) maintains that since the nineteenth century public monuments have been another way that national cultural and political identity at the popular level is constructed and maintained, in some instances by the fostering of imagined communities, for example associated with collective memories of war. He argues that the ‘iconography of statues exposes how class, “race”, and gender differences are negotiated in public spaces’ (Johnson 1995: 62). National symbols and nation-building in post-apartheid South Africa have been built around the metaphor of the ‘Rainbow Nation’ promoting the racial, ethnic and cultural groups living in harmony. There is a new national flag, anthem, and a new constitution comprising a Bill of Rights that promotes ‘democratic value of human dignity, the equality of all people, common citizenship and freedom’. However, not all ethnic groups value these attempts at nation-building with African Black groups being the most receptive (Bornman 2006: 385).

Featherstone (1995) maintains that nations can be considered imagined communities in the sense that they share a sense of belonging and attachment to those that share a symbolic space. An essential part of nation-building is the construction of a complex ethnic core and it is from this that a national community can be invented. A common repository of myths, heroes, events, landscapes and memories all contribute to developing a sense of nationhood. The generation of cultural media and artefacts reinforce this sense of collective identity over time and culminate in a shared sense of nostalgia. Consumers play out these myths such as those identified by Belk and Costa (1998) in the acting out of the 1825–40 fur trade rendezvous held in the Rocky Mountains in the American West, or in Wild West shows (Peñaloza 2001). Stern (1995) has focused on the myths that appear in consumer narratives, how they are related by particular characters, and what form they take in advertisements via her interpretive analysis of Thanksgiving food advertising.

There have been a significant number of studies in marketing that have focused on the concept of creating a national identity. Advertising is replete with what might be interpreted as national themes and influences. For example, some advertisements promulgate the national character of brands—the Irishness of Guinness, the Americaness of Levi’s, and the Swedishness of IKEA (Frosh 2007). Advertising is also ingrained with national symbols and stereotypes of other nationalities (O’Barr 1994), while national conceptions of ‘the self’ shape the production of advertising strategies and campaigns. Nationalism is intimately related to consumerism. The concept of the ‘citizen-consumer’ has been advanced by Cohen (2004) when advertisers during the Second World War asked consumers to make daily sacrifices in the form of rationing and self-constraint to help the war effort, while simultaneously being ‘purchaser consumers’ that would support the free market system for which America was fighting. The success of Japan as a new democracy after the Second World War was driven by developing a mass consumer culture. Recent criticism has come as a result of the country failing to spend itself out of a protracted recession. The influence of advertising and other promotional techniques as shapers of national sentiment has been described by Michael Billig as ‘banal nationalism’. He suggests that within established nations there is a constant circulation of discourses of nationhood that remind citizens of their national place in the world of nations. However, the process of reminding is so continual, and ever present that it is rarely consciously registered as a process of reminding.

The previous discussion suggests that nation and national are h...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• 1 Dimensions of culture
• 2 Consumer behaviour
• 3 Products
• 4 Promotional strategies
• 5 Distribution
• 6 Internet and mobile commerce
• 7 Pricing strategies
• 8 Marketing management practice
• 9 Marketing research
• Bibliography