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Consumer Behavior and Culture Marieke de Mooij Sage Publications Thousand Oaks, CA 2003 ISBN 0-7619-2669-0
Keywords Consumer behaviour, Global marketing, Culture
Review DOI 10.1108/07363760410558708
This book is about the importance of culture in the discipline of consumer behavior, specifically focusing on key aspects of consumption and consumer behavior across cultures. Indeed, some (or maybe the majority) of us still hold a belief that culture is simply a context in which consumer behavior takes place. Such a perspective is displayed by authors of popular consumer behavior textbooks, where chapters titled something like "The Meaning and Nature of Culture" or "Cross-cultural Variations in Consumer Behavior" are common when introducing the idea of variations in consumer behavior.
Unlike the typical consumer behavior textbook, Consumer Behavior and Culture suggests that culture and consumer behavior are intimately knotted together and "untying the rope" is almost an impossible task. The book conveys a very simple message: "There are no global consumers, so the global market concept is a purely theoretical concept" (p. 314). To support his argument, the author presents a wealth of statistical information, including graphs and charts. The book also covers a variety of subjects, including the concept of self, social processes, mental processes, retailing, convergence, and globalization.
The introductory chapter, "Global Consumers in a Global Village", primarily focuses on revealing misconceptions as well as challenging some widely disseminated assumptions regarding globalization. In his own words, the author suggests that the proposition that "increased global mobility for business and vacations will cause people to homogenize" (p. 5) simply is not supported by behavior...