Content area
Full text
The increased pace of globalization has greatly increased the importance of cross-cultural marketing research. Firms must recognize the cultural variations that exist between different countries and cultures in order to be successful in the global marketplace. The key to profitability and satisfying consumers on a global scale is to devise a marketing strategy that takes into account consumers' cultural variation. Since the last special issue of this Journal on cross-cultural research was published about five years ago, the time is ripe for another special issue that sets the stage for cross-cultural research in the twenty-first century.
In the last few years, cross-cultural marketing research has made substantial progress in the areas of conceptual and definitional issues, theories and substantive findings, and in attacking methodological problems. As an example of conceptual and definitional issues consider the complex definitions of individualism and collectivism and the relation between culture and self. Individualism and collectivism are no longer seen as complete opposites of each other. It is now understood that they coexist in individuals at differing levels. Westerhof et al. (2000) studied the meaning of self and life amongst the US and Congolese elderly by using a sentence completion test. As expected, they found that these concepts coexist in different people and different cultures. Although both samples had a relatively high level of collectivistic answers, the US sample had relatively more individualistic responses than the Congolese.
Furthermore, research has revealed that within individualist and collectivist cultures there were differences that needed to be further classified into subcultures. The sub-cultures were classified according to social relationships. By labeling social relationships as either horizontal or vertical, researchers were better able to investigate these cultures. The horizontal social relationship describes each individual as being equal to all others. However, the vertical social relationship describes a difference among individuals according to rank, which is similar to a hierarchy. Ultimately, a four-way classification is created to show: horizontal collectivism, vertical individualism, horizontal individualism, and vertical collectivism within cultures (Gurhan-Canli and Maheswaran, 2000). This four-way classification model has shown how culture can directly influence a new product's success or failure in a particular country.
In theoretical and substantive terms, the country of origin effects have been proposed to understand the perception of products, that is...