Introduction to the Handbook on Cross-Cultural Marketing

A number of years ago, a very senior marketing professor who had served on many editorial review boards was speaking at a marketing educators’ conference. He quipped, “Someday, I would like to write a paper entitled ‘Doing Marketing in ________.’’’ Identifying different marketing practices in other countries to learn how those countries compared to a home country was a new and popular approach at the time. However, it may be too limited to capture the nuances of marketing in today’s interconnected global environment. The second half of the twentieth century gave rise to global thinking in a more complex interconnected world. From America’s post-war prosperity to the resurrection of the European economy through the Marshall Plan; from the emergence of multinational companies to the rise of Japan Inc. and other Asian Tigers; and from the growth of regional trading blocs from the North American Free Trade Agreement to the European Union, all indicators were that the world – along with consumer tastes – was converging (Levitt, 1983). As the industrial twentieth century gave birth to the information-driven twenty-first century, the Soviet Union collapsed, and the end of the Cold War opened access to the markets and intellectual capital of the Eastern Bloc. China, the world’s largest communist country, emerged as the world’s factory and, recently, its second largest economy. This was matched by the breathtaking economic growth of the world’s largest democracy, India. The twenty-first century was being hailed as the Pacific Century as global economic momentum seemed to have shifted from the West to Asia’s emerging powerhouses. Marketing researchers began to conduct cross-national, multinational, and cross-cultural (often used interchangeably) research to understand the opportunities and challenges of operating in this globally interdependent world. Cross-cultural studies began to compare consumers and employees from different countries along various dimensions such as Hall’s work on time and proxemics and Hofstede’s seminal five cultural dimensions. As units of analysis, countries provided convenient ways to segment markets and study differences between, say, United States (US) consumers compared with German consumers. There were many opportunities for “Doing Business in__________” papers comparing consumers in Country A with those in Country B. However, increased interaction among consumers worldwide