Reflexive Culture’s Consequences

Abstract

Investigations of marketing relations across cultures have traditionally focused on culture as a background variable, a collection of essential character traits, habits, practices, categorizations, and so forth within a given domain that would explain the approach to and degree of acceptance of various marketing practices from abroad. Most often, such discussions are based in a Hofstedean tradition (for a review of the use of particular culture theories in literature and the dominance of Hofstede-based approaches, see Nakata and Izberk-Bilgin this volume). The role of cultural understanding in this perspective aims to predict the problems or potential misunderstandings arising from different cultural backgrounds in a marketing exchange relation or in cross-cultural managerial interactions (see, for example, Douglas and Craig’s work in this volume). Moreover, the basic question in the relation between marketing and culture is the standardization-adaptation debate, that is, the degree to which certain established marketing strategies or tactics would be applicable in a different cultural context. The unit of analysis is almost inevitably the nation-state, albeit with occasional references to subcultures, such as different ethnic groups. However, the inherent weaknesses of this approach, focusing on the comparison of cultural similarities and differences between nations, occasionally even turning to measuring the “cultural distances” between them, are becoming more and more evident in today’s globalizing environment—hence the need for a different look at relations between culture and marketing.