Multicultural Perspectives in Customer Behaviour

Maria Piacentini, Charles Cui, Maria G. Piacentini, Charles C. Cui

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781138008922
• eBook ISBN: 9781135744151
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

With globalisation taking centre stage in the business world and multiculturalism affecting markets and societies, there is a need to understand the ways that customers respond to the changing marketplace from international and multicultural perspectives. This book is timely in addressing important themes raised in the most recent marketing literature, such as: global consumer culture, and the impact of Western culture on consumer behaviour in other countries; consumer acculturation processes, and the impact on identity conflicts and the strategies people use to manage them; globalisation vs. localised strategies, and the interaction of local and global influences on customer behaviour; climate change and global warming, the impact on consumer behaviour, and the implications for social responsibility; and cross-cultural customer research, including important methodological questions around the application of sociological, group-level measures to psychological, individual-level phenomenon in marketing contexts. The papers in this edition address those themes, reporting on studies from a range of countries, including Germany, Greece, China, and Austria, and a number of cultural groups in the UK. These papers draw on quantitative and qualitative methodologies, reflecting the full range of methods employed in contemporary consumer research.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

Introduction

Maria G. Piacentini, Lancaster University Management School, UK

Charles C. Cui, Manchester Business School, UK

With globalisation taking centre stage in the business world and multiculturalism affecting markets and societies, there is a need to understand the ways that customers respond to the changing marketplace from international and multicultural perspectives. This special edition comprises a set of papers on the theme of ‘Multicultural Perspectives in Customer Behaviour’, emerging from the 6th Customer Research Academy Workshop Series (CRAWS) hosted by Manchester and Lancaster Universities in April 2008.

This special edition is timely in addressing important themes raised in the most recent marketing literature, such as: global consumer culture, and the impact of Western culture on consumer behaviour in other countries (Cleveland & Laroche, 2007); consumer acculturation processes, and the impact on identity conflicts and the strategies people use to manage them (Askegaard, Arnould, & Kjeldgaard, 2005; Jafari & Goulding, 2008; Oswald, 1999; Penaloza, 1994; Ustuner & Holt, 2007); globalisation vs. localised strategies, and the interaction of local and global influences on customer behaviour (Belk, 2006); climate change and global warming, the impact on consumer behaviour, and the implications for social responsibility (Lash & Wellington, 2007); and cross-cultural customer research, including important methodological questions around the application of sociological, group-level measures to psychological, individual-level phenomenon in marketing contexts (Bearden, Money, & Nevins, 2006; Lass & Hart, 2004; Salciuviene, Auruskeviciene, & Lydeka, 2005; Shavitt, Lalwani, Zhang, & Torelli, 2006; Singh, Kwon, & Pereira, 2003).

The papers in this special edition address those themes, reporting on studies from a range of countries, including Germany, Greece, China, and Austria, and a number of cultural groups in the UK. These papers draw on quantitative and qualitative methodologies, reflecting the full range of methods employed in contemporary consumer research.

Our opening paper, by Andrea Davies and James Fitchett, focuses on the processes of becoming part of a new culture, specifically how visiting residents in the UK for less than three months cope with cultural fracture (defined as the thoughts and feelings that individuals associate with an acculturation situation in which they must modify their previously held and accepted skills, expectations, behaviours, values, and competencies from ‘home’). Davies and Fitchett examine the proposition that immigrant consumption may constitute an important type of cultural learning, an intriguing and original perspective on consumption in multicultural contexts. This is different from earlier models of acculturation and consumption whereby a new culture is often considered an antecedent of acculturation and consumer competence. Rather, Davies and Fitchett demonstrate that consumption activities and attitudes facilitate the development of cultural knowledge and understanding, and indeed potentially aid those individuals as they cope with their experiences of cultural fracture. They also highlight the importance of understanding this issue alongside an understanding of materiality and possession centrality (i.e. how skilled and confident the individual is in aspects of consumption), and find that visitors possessing higher levels of possession centrality experience less cultural fracture than those with lower levels of possession centrality. Overall, they conclude that ‘individuals who live in consumer cultures and have therefore developed abilities to read, encode, and interpret consumption symbolism are likely also to be better able to cope with the transnational movement’. This has important implications for companies and organisations who serve consumers who are likely to spend extended periods of time in other countries (such as overseas students, business travellers, international teachers, etc.). For instance, apart from cultural factors identified in conventional marketing models derived from acculturation theories, marketers may benefit from researching such types of consumers' consumption experience, capabilities, and preferences in their home culture, and how these factors affect their response to a new cultural environment, and hence how companies could better serve their ‘acculturated’ consumption behaviours.

The paper by Rudolf Sinkovics, ‘Mink’ Leelapanyalert, and Mo Yamin explores consumer decision styles in Austria in comparison with reports about other countries in the literature. The authors argue that when approaching complex purchasing decisions, consumers' mental orientations characterise particular information search, learning, and decision patterns, which are crucial to the actual purchasing behaviour. In this context, the authors examine the concept of consumer decision styles and its measurement using the Consumer Styles Inventory (CSI) (Sproles & Kendall, 1986) in Austria (an unexplored country context). The authors concur with the view about the danger of simply using ‘borrowed scales’ (Douglas & Nijssen, 2003) in cross-national research and urge further replication and extension studies of consumer research instruments to minimise the detrimental effects of wrong conceptualisation and operationalisation. Despite the fact that replications are not very popular in marketing, consumer behaviour, and advertising research (Hubbard & Armstrong, 1994; Madden, Easley, & Dunn, 1995), they argue that from an epistemological perspective replications are vital to scientific progress (Collins, 1985; Evanschitzky, Baumgarth, Hubbard, & Armstrong, 2007) and make an important contribution to the advancement and generalisation of marketing results (Koçak, Abimbola, & Özer, 2007). Supported by this view, the authors explore the dimensions of CSI by replication of this instrument in the Austrian consumer context and compare their results with previous studies from Germany, the UK, the United States, South Korea, and China.

The dimensions of CSI have been found to deviate slightly in some studies. For example, the ‘time-energy conservation’ dimension is found in Korea and China, while ‘variety seeking’ is found in Germany. From their Austrian sample data and comparison with other studies, Sinkovics et al. report some interesting patterns from their analysis. For example, the dimensions ‘Perfectionist’, ‘Brand Conscious’, and ‘Confused by overchoice’ occurred in most countries, including the Austrian case. Their results confirm Mitchell and Bates's (1998) finding that ‘confused by overchoice’ occurs in most countries because of overloaded information and too many product choices (Klausegger, Sinkovics, & Zou, 2007). An important point raised by Sinkovics et al. is that ‘issues observed in multicultural societies may not only reside within culturally diverse societies but can also arise in cross-cultural communication and understanding activate within a culturally homogenous society’. The arguments and results from their study lend strong support to the view that marketing instruments must be validated by replications in the cultural contexts to be applied to, and marketers should not overlook the fact that homogeneity at a local scale such as Austria is not equivalent to the homogeneity at the global level, and, vice versa, heterogeneity perceived at the global scale should not be seen as exclusion of homogeneity at a local scale.

The third paper, by Laura Salciuviene, Pervez N. Ghauri, Ruth Salomea Streder, and Claudio De Mattos, pp. 1037–1056 has identified an important research gap where inconsistent findings are reported with regard to foreign brand names and their effects on brand preferences. To contribute to filling this gap, they employed the congruity and categorisation theories and examined the effects of incongruity between brand names in foreign languages and country of origin on hedonic perceptions and preferences of services. Salciuviene et al.'s study is timely and important in that marketers are challenged by the increasing diversity in conditions that dictate different consumer perceptions and choices. As the authors claim based on their review of the literature, country image's influence is higher than brand when consumers are not familiar with the brand. In such a case, it is expected that services from a country that has a hedonic image may be perceived as more hedonic than those from a country that has no perceptions of a hedonic image. On the other hand, the change of the market factors, such as the increasing use of the Internet and products being designed in one country but manufactured in another, has resulted in the diminishing importance of country boundaries, and hence the difficulty in identification of country of origin in consumers' perception of product and service. This has given rise to the importance of increasing attention to brand names, especially use of brand names in foreign languages.

Their findings suggest that: insurance services branded with French names are perceived as offering higher hedonic values than those with German or English brand names; services associated with a country with a hedonic image (e.g. France) are perceived as more hedonic; brand names in languages other than the language of the home country of origin (i.e. incongruence) increase consumer preferences for those services; and that incongruence between the language of a brand name and country of origin of utilitarian services leads to a stronger perception of the suitability of those brand names. The authors found the role of gender in choices of services branded in foreign languages is inconclusive and suggest further investigation.

The results from their study suggest that incongruence between a brand name in a foreign language and the country of origin (either home country or a foreign country associated with prior knowledge) of a service represented by this brand name may lead to increased perceptions (consistent with their prior knowledge) for the service represented by such a brand name. In other words, marketers need to be aware that the effect of the country of origin is not absent but functions in a different way through the association with the foreign language used with brand names. For academics and marketing practitioners, this study inspires attention to new important issues such as: whether or not the country-of-origin notion is still relevant in the current age of diminishing country boundaries in the product/service supply chain; how consumers gain their knowledge of the country of the language used in brand names; and how bilingual/multilingual consumers perceive brand names differently from monolingual consumers in a multicultural society or the global market.

A major theme in recent consumer acculturation studies has been that of identity conflicts and the strategies people use to manage them (Askegaard et al., 2005; Jafari & Goulding, 2008; Oswald, 1999; Penaloza, 1994; Ustuner & Holt, 2007). This is developed in a number of papers appearing in this special issue, including the paper by Amandeep Takhar, Pauline Maclaran, Elizabeth Parsons, and Anne Broderick. Their paper is about Indian cinema culture (i.e. Bollywood), and the paper focuses on the ways that the wider processes of globalisation and acculturation play out through this medium and how, in turn, this may impact on the identities of its young audience at the local level. This paper shows how Bollywood films function as a cultural medium through which it is possible to explore changing identities, values, and expectations of young British Sikhs negotiating a position for themselves. A novel methodology is adopted, drawing on the netnographic approach (Kozinets, 2002), but also combining offline interviews. The first author was immersed in the research site (an online Sikh matchmaking service) in the search for a partner herself. The Bollywood characters provide a way for these third-generation British Sikhs to self-categorise their social identity (Hogg & Terry, 2000; Turner, 1987), and in this way reconnect with this part of their social history and culture. Bollywood films enable a form of re-engagement with their Sikh values, which may be weaker for this group of third-generation British Sikh community members. For these young people, Bollywood film provides a powerful way for them to connect to their British Sikh ethnic identity, and facilitates their constructions of the romantic self. However, the participants were ‘torn’ between their Western selves (with the accompanying identity values that accompany being Western) and their more romanticised selves that aspire to the romance as presented in the Bollywood genre (a similar finding to that of Jafari & Goulding, 2008, in their study of consumption practices of UK-based young Iranians, and the conflicts and dilemmas they experienced between their Iranian and UK ide...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Key Issues in Marketing Management
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Material man is not an island: Coping with cultural fracture
• 3. A comparative examination of consumer decision styles in Austria
• 4. Do brand names in a foreign language lead to different brand perceptions?
• 5. Consuming Bollywood: Young Sikhs social comparisons with heroes and heroines in Indian films
• 6. Exploring appropriation of global cultural rituals
• 7. The interrelationship between desired and undesired selves and consumption: The case of Greek female consumers' experiences
• 8. Self-gift giving in China and the UK: Collectivist versus individualist orientations
• 9. Death and disposal: The universal, environmental dilemma
• 10. Researching consumers in multicultural societies: Emerging methodological issues
• Index