Culture

Culture is a society’s personality.

 Culture
• Culture includes both abstract ideas such as
values and ethics and material objects such as
automobiles, clothing, food, art, … that a
society produces.

• Culture is the accumulation of shared

meanings, rituals, norms, and traditions
among members of an organization or society.
 Culture
• Culture is the lens through which people view
products.

• Our culture determines the overall priorities

we attach to different activities and products.
• Relationship between consumer behaviour
and culture is a two-way street:

– On the one hand, customers choose products that

resonates their priorities.
– On the other hand, products used by majority of
customers in a society provide information on the
dominant cultural ideals of that period.
 Culture as a dynamic System

• Culture is not static. Culture evolves as it

combines old ideas with new ones.

• Common worldviews (e.g. principles of

aesthetic); social structures (e.g. norms,
values, …) might change and evolve over
time.
• A product that provides benefits to members of a culture at
any point in time has a much better chance to achieve
marketplace acceptance.

• Examples:
• Miller’s success when brewer launched its Lite beer in the mid-
1970s (men and women began to emphasise the concept of fit,
trim body as an ideal of appearance in the mid 1970s).

• Gablinger introduced a low calorie beer in the 1960s, and the

product failed (men didn’t worry abut weight loss in the
1960s).
 Syndicated Surveys
• companies track changes in value through
large scale surveys.
• They sell the results to marketers.

• For example, sales might have declined due to

shifts in value regarding appearance and
naturalness
 Cultural Selection
• Many options initially compete for adoption. However, most
of them drop out of the list.
• This winnowing out process is called cultural selection.

• We don’t form our tastes and product preferences in vacuum.

• Images mass media present to us, observation of those
around us, fantasy worlds marketers create in ads influence
our decision and affect the winnowing out process.
• Such influential factors constantly change and evolve.
Therfore, our tastes and preferences change and evolve, too.
 High vs. Low culture
High culture (products/activities) Popular culture (products/activities)
Cultural Formula
• This ad
follows the
cultural
formula of a
horror movie
poster.

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 Cultural formula
• Cultural formula: A story with events that
might be in sequence.

• Ads can be designed by using the cultural

formula of a particular movie or novel
 Cultural stories and ceremonies
• Every culture develops stories and ceremonies
that help its members to communicate shared
values.
• Myths and rituals are surface manifestations
of culture.
• Marketers adapt these
stories, and pattern
their message along a
mythic structure.

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 Rituals
• A set of multiple, symbolic behaviours that occurs in a
fixed sequence and is repeated periodically (e.g.
getting ready to go to work, graduation ceremonies).

• We use certain items to perform our rituals.

• Research shows that we are unlikely to replace items

we use to perform our rituals.
• Sometimes, even, we are unlikely to use different
brands.
 Rituals
• Rituals can occur in:
– Large groups (e.g. graduation ceremony,
presidential inaugurations)
– Small groups (e.g. Christmas rituals)
– In isolation (e.g. getting ready for work in the
morning)
• Many business benefit because they supply
ritual artefacts to consumers.
• Ritual artefacts are items needed to perform
rituals.
 Standardized vs. localized Strategies
• Products that succeed in one culture may fail in
another if marketers fail to understand the differences
among customers in each place.

• The question is to what extent a multinational company

need to tailor its marketing strategies to each culture.

• Etic perspective (standard product to everyone)

perspective vs. emic perspective (adapting approaches
to local values and practices)
 Hofstede Dimensions of National Culture

• Power distance
• Individualism
• Masculinity
• Uncertainty avoidance
• Long-term orientation
• Indulgence versus restraint

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Ltd.
 Global Marketing
• Western culture has a huge impact around the
world, although people in different countries don’t
necessary ascribe the same meaning to products.

• Some people resist globalization because of they

fear it will dilute their culture.

• In other cases, they practice creolization as they

integrate international products with existing
cultural practices.
 Does Global Marketing Work?

• To maximize the chances of success in

multicultural efforts that are standardized,
marketers must locate consumers in different
countries that share a common worldview (e.g.
people with a more international or cosmopolitan
frame of reference; people who receive
information from a worldwide perspective).

• Affluent people who are “global citizens” (come

into contact with ideas from around the world).