Marketing Management

A Cultural Perspective

Luca M. Visconti, Lisa Peñaloza, Nil Toulouse, Luca M. Visconti, Lisa Peñaloza, Nil Toulouse

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781138561410
  9781138561403
• Edition: 2
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351358828
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Culture pervades consumption and marketing activity in ways that potentially benefit marketing managers. This book provides a comprehensive account of cultural knowledge and skills useful in strategic marketing management. In making these cultural concepts and frameworks accessible and in discussing how to use them, this edited textbook goes beyond the identification of historical, sociocultural, and political factors impinging upon consumer cultures and their effects on market outcomes.

This fully updated and restructured new edition provides two new introductory chapters on culture and marketing practice and improved pedagogy, to give a deeper understanding of how culture pervades consumption and marketing phenomena; the way market meanings are made, circulated, and negotiated; and the environmental, ethical, experiential, social, and symbolic implications of consumption and marketing. The authors highlight the benefits that managers can reap from applying interpretive cultural approaches across the realm of strategic marketing activities including: market segmentation, product and brand positioning, market research, pricing, product development, advertising, and retail distribution. Global contributions are grounded in the authors' primary research with a range of companies including Cadbury's Flake, Dior, Dove, General Motors, HOM, Hummer, Kjaer Group, Le Bon Coin, Mama Shelter, Mecca Cola, Prada, SignBank, and the Twilight community. This edited volume, which compiles the work of 58 scholars from 14 countries, delivers a truly innovative, multinationally focused marketing management textbook.

Marketing Management: A Cultural Perspective is a timely and relevant learning resource for marketing students, lecturers, and managers across the world.

Part I

Global-local cultural domains

1 Cultures, consumers, and corporations

Russell Belk

Overview

When a product or service marketer attempts to market in different cultures, there is inevitably the question of whether to attempt localized versions of its offerings as opposed to more standardized global offerings (see Ger, Kravets, and Sandıkcı in the chapter that follows). There is no fixed answer to this question, but it should always be based on an understanding of local cultures. This chapter uses the example of food consumption to illustrate the way in which a cultural perspective can help inform these decisions. It introduces some key concepts such as cosmopolitanism, sacrifice, and prestige, as well as some key cultural considerations such as class, gender, age, and religion to help in analyzing the effect that marketing offerings are likely to have in different cultures. And it shows how an interpretive approach to researching and understanding markets provides a more informed and complete understanding of food preferences.

In early 1999, construction began on a fast food outlet in Mutare, Zimbabwe. Local residents looked forward to the store with great anticipation. A rumor was widely circulated that it was to be Zimbabwe’s first McDonald’s restaurant—a possibility that was eagerly and hopefully embraced because it would mean that Zimbabwe had arrived. It was believed that McDonald’s employed a formula that calculated a country’s economic development and that a certain level had to be reached before McDonald’s corporate headquarters would entertain selling a franchise. When it turned out that the fast food outlet was instead a Nando’s—a Portuguese chicken chain from South Africa—the disappointment was palpable. This was in spite of the fact that chicken is more common in Zimbabwean diets than beef, although both were a stretch from the local staple of a white corn mash called sadza that is normally served with greens and condiments like tiny dried kapenta fish.

The would-be welcome of McDonald’s in Zimbabwe contrasts sharply with the restaurant’s reception in many other parts of the world. Schlosser (2002: 243–244) records some other global activity involving McDonald’s during the same time period:

1995400 Danes loot a McDonald’s in downtown Copenhagen.

1996Indian farmers ransack a McDonald’s in Bangalore (Bengaluru).

1997A McDonald’s in Cali, Colombia, is destroyed by a car bomb.

1998Bombs destroy two McDonald’s in St. Petersburg, Russia, and one in Rio de Janeiro.

1999Belgians set fire to a McDonald’s in Antwerp and more than a dozen McDonald’s are attacked in Beijing.

2000Protesters destroy a McDonald’s in London’s Trafalgar Square and bomb a McDonald’s in a small French town in Brittany.

Lest these acts seem like a millenarian anomaly, a look at more recent McDonald’s incidents suggests that it continues to act as a magnet for terrorists, although they are apparently now attracted as patrons as well as bombers and shooters:

2013Canadian police arrest a terrorist eating a meal at a Montreal McDonald’s. He was charged with plotting to blow up the Toronto-New York City VIA Rail train.

2014All Moroccan McDonald’s restaurants are closed after terrorist bomb threats.

2015Pictures are circulated of ISIS fighters eating in a Turkish McDonald’s.

2016A terrorist shooting at a McDonald’s in Munich kills 10 and injures 36. The shooter lured his targets on Facebook by promising them free McDonald’s food.

2017A terrorist bomb explodes in a McDonald’s in St. Petersburg, Russia, and a British court rejects the plea of a terrorist accused of having a role in the 7/7 London bombings to visit McDonald’s in order to buy Happy Meals.

It is evident from these very divergent examples of embracing and rejecting the American fast food chain McDonald’s that there is something very basic about global foods that precipitates such strong reactions. They are a symbol of America as well as a symbol of global capitalism. And industry leading companies are also inevitably the target of xenophobic rumors and urban legends (Fine, 1992). Nevertheless, the global reach of such corporations can conceivably be something that, like certain clothing, footwear, and music, gives us a feeling of global unity. Thomas Friedman (1999) went further and claimed that no two countries that have McDonald’s restaurants will ever go to war. This claim, earlier satirized by Belk (1996) as the Pax McDonald’s, has since been proven false. But the audacious claim that capitalism and McDonald’s will bring peace to the world shows the symbolic power of both.

In the first edition of this book, I wrote that despite the importance of food and eating and the ways in which culture influences our food preferences and consumption, textbooks on marketing management and strategy lacked attention to these topics. This is still largely true, but more attention is now being devoted to food and beverage topics. This includes topics such as online food pornography (Kozinets, Patterson, & Ashman 2017), fair trade foods (Trentmann, 2011), regional food preferences (Dion & Sitz, 2012), the slow food movement (Cochoy, 2011), gendered food advertising (Stevens & Ostberg, 2012), and organic foods and the globalization of food preferences (Ekström, Ottosson, & Parment, 2017). Interpretive consumer research has much to say about these and other food and beverage topics of interest to management, as I suggest in the remainder of this chapter.

This chapter takes a cultural, interpretive approach and uses food as a context in which to better appreciate how considerations of the global and the local should influence strategic and tactical international marketing management (see the chapters in part III for more information on interpretive research methods). This approach differs from non-interpretive approaches to understanding culture in that rather than quantitative survey research, it uses qualitative observations, ethnography, and in-depth interviews to provide a richly textured picture of the influences of culture. An example of the alternative survey-based approach to culture and consumption is a book by Marieke de Mooij (2004) entitled Consumer Behavior and Culture. She attempts to understand consumption of food and beverages by correlating national consumption levels of various products with measures of four cultural variables: Power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/femininity, and uncertainty avoidance, following Hofstede (1991). Thus, we are told for instance that people consume more soft drinks in masculine cultures like the US and the UK, and people drink more tea in high uncertainty avoidance cultures like Japan and China. As one evidence of the fallibility of such quantitative correlational approaches, Sheth (2017) finds that the best predictors of soft drink consumption (specifically Coca-Cola), are the climate (specifically, high temperatures) of a place and the proportion of young people in the culture. Both factors lead to dramatic consumption differences ranging from 64 bottles of cola per year per capita to well over 400, with those from older and colder countries drinking the least. But both studies stop short of offering an understanding of what various beverages mean in a culture. The objective of this chapter is to suggest interpretive research as a richer approach to understanding how culture—including rituals, symbols, hierarchies, and norms (Geertz, 1973)—influences our everyday consumption behavior. Such knowledge can be of enormous use to marketing managers in marketing globally.

For example, the design and idea firm IDEO was hired to improve the San Francisco school lunch program (Caula, 2014; IDEO, 2013; Ozenc, 2017; San Francisco Unified School District, 2013; Stinson, 2014). The problem was that although the school system provided inexpensive (in some cases free) nutritious school lunches, the majority of students did not eat them. Using ethnographic research, IDEO redesigned cafeterias, menus, curricula, and procedures in a way that dramatically increased participation in the school lunch program while reducing costs. They recognized that different grades had different cultures and they developed different programs for these various micro-cultures. At the grade school level, they found that students were intimidated by having to queue and wait for their turn to go through the cafeteria line and ask for the foods to be placed on their trays. The symbolism of their cafeterias was not unlike that of a prison with long drab tables and benches. And the ritual of running the gauntlet of indifferent servers scared many grade school students. There was a clear hierarchal difference between servers and students and stringent norms that the students should move swiftly, quietly, and efficiently through the line. After IDEO’s study, many changes were made including tying the origins of the foods to the curriculum, switching to round plates, placing round serving bowls on each table, and round tables with colorful individual chairs. The food was brought to the table and students helped themselves. A designated student was in charge of each table. There was a change in the rituals to be much more like a home or restaurant meal with food shared by those at a given table. By tying the foods to the curriculum, students found that the dining experience was interesting and fun. Where a food came from, how it came to their table, and who produced it added a multicultural atmosphere that helped transform the experience of eating.

Because food consumption is a critical component of culture and national identity, it is an important context in which to consider how marketing strategies, globalization forces, and consumers influence one another, our environment, and human wellbeing. That is, what we put on our table has a great deal to say about how culture, consumption, and corporations interact in today’s world and what sorts of issues we might think about in buying, selling, and regulating trade in a global context.

1.1Food for thought

1.1.1Tastes, distastes, and identities

Food and eating have become prominent topics in social research. According to a recent appraisal,

One could argue that the anthropology of the second half of the twentieth century was practically founded on food studies, with Lévi-Strauss’s The Raw and the Cooked (1969/1983) and The Origin of Table Manners (1978/1990) occupying pride of place.

(Farquhar, 2006, p. 147)

Food and beverage taste preferences are not primarily biological or universal. Our tastes and distastes are instead largely a matter of culture (Belasco & Scranton, 2002; Korsmeyer, 2005; Montanari, 1994). That is, the national, ethic, and regional cultures and subcultures we live in affects what we think tastes good. We begin to learn these preferences as children and they become deeply ingrained in our notions of home, family, and personal as well as group identity (Lupton, 1996; Wilson, 2006). It is no surprise that ethnic and regional foodways have been characterized as “the performance of group identity” (Brown & Mussell, 1984; Swislocki, 2008). The foods we eat are like the language we speak in distinguishing “us” from “them.” Just as we can learn another language or marry someone who speaks a different language, we can learn to like other foods or marry someone from a different food culture. But generally speaking, our initial food culture is like our mother tongue in that it feels natural and totally comfortable (Wilk, 2008). When children are adopted from another culture, their new parents often try to make them familiar with food from their culture of birth (Bergquist, 2006), as if not doing so would deprive them of a birthright. When immigrants lack the language of their birth culture, food can become the primary sign that identifies their cultural and group identity (Mankekar, 2002; Threadgold, 2000). In other words, food is not only good to eat, it is good to think with (Tambiah, 1969). It is constitutive of our identities. Sharing food forges and reinforces bonds with family, friends, and neighbors, while being excluded from such sharing, especially during ritual holiday meals, is a mark of otherness (e.g., Fiske, 1991; Shuman, 2001).

Beyond actual exclusion, food likes and hates help to distinguish group membership based on tastes. Wilk (1997, p. 185) gives four examples based on food preferences:

1.Like/inclusion—We like red beans

2.Like/exclusion—They like black beans

3.Dislike/inclusion—We hate black beans

4.Dislike/exclusion—They hate red beans

Thus, what we hate can be as powerful a basis for group boundaries as what we love. So strong can these aversions be that the thought of certain foods that are perfectly acceptable to others can provoke feelings of revulsion and disgust (Miller, 1997; Pillsbury, 1998; Rozin & Fallon, 1987). As Christopher Columbus learned in the Caribbean, in Colonial times, many groups rightly or wrongly accused their enemies of being cannibals (Brown, 2013; Visser, 1991). Moreover, it is not only cultures that have different tastes. Groups can also form as consumption communities that share food tastes and distastes. Prominent examples include vegetarian...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• List of Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction
• Part I Global-local cultural domains
• Part II Consumer and marketer identity and community politics
• Part III Researching consumers, marketers, and markets
• Part IV Refashioning marketing practices
• Part V Institutional issues in the marketing organization and academy
• Index