Abstract
This chapter reviews culture-bound approaches in the international marketing literature. Although these models are still very relevant and set the foundation for a detailed understanding by the firm of whether and to what extent host markets are different from the home market, they are also open to question because of evolving societies and customer behavior. The chapter outlines the concept of culture and its key understandings along different dimensions by illustrating some key dimensional models of culture. It then reflects on the paradoxes emerging when considering increasingly hybridized customers—from the point of view of the cultures they are influenced by—and proposes to move beyond traditional, culturally bound target segments and go in the direction of one-to-one marketing and of buyer personas so to capture increasingly complex customer behaviors.
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Notes
- 1.
It is beyond the scope of the present work to provide a comprehensive review of the different definitions of culture.
- 2.
Lee (1966) suggested a four-step approach to eliminate the SRC when approaching strategic issues that entail foreign markets with a distant culture:
• Define the problem or goal in terms of home country culture, traits, habits, and norms.
• Isolate the SRC influence on the problem and examine it carefully to see how it exacerbates the problem.
• Redefine the problem without the SRC influence and solve it based on the foreign market situation.
- 3.
Nevertheless, millennials sometimes exhibit paradoxical attitudes toward cars, and it seems that even if they are likely to complement a property car with car sharing services, the ownership of a car is still perceived as indicating autonomy and status (cf. Magnani et al., 2018).
- 4.
Brand loyalty can be regarded as a complex and dimensional construct (Rundle-Thiele & Bennett, 2001; Knox & Walker, 2003). Oliver (1999, p 34) defines it as “...a deeply held commitment to rebuy or repatronize a preferred product/service consistently in the future, thereby causing repetitive same-brand or same brand-set purchasing, despite situational influences and marketing efforts having the potential to cause switching behaviour.” Worthington et al. (2010) developed a useful tridimensional approach to brand loyalty dimensions. Brand loyalty is conceptualized as being made up of behavioral loyalty, cognitive loyalty, and emotional loyalty. Behavioral loyalty relates to the act of repurchasing a brand (e.g., Liu et al., 2012); it can be expressed as the purchasing of a brand over time or as the amount of spending on a brand within a given category of products (Worthington et al., 2010; Venkateswaran et al., 2011). Cognitive loyalty is based on the observable information of a brand, including price and its features (Oliver, 1999) emotional loyalty is the degree of positive feelings a consumer experiences from repurchasing a brand (Oliver, 1999).
- 5.
The expression “multicultural” is frequently utilized as an illustrative term to characterize the fact of diversity in Western neo-liberal democratic societies. Multiculturalism is somehow opposed to the concept of a “melting pot,” according to which individuals from minority groups are absorbed into the predominant culture.
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Magnani, G. (2022). A Review of Culture-Bound Approaches to International Marketing and Trends Ahead. In: Marketing in Culturally Distant Countries. International Series in Advanced Management Studies. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-04832-6_3
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