ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is to assess the consumer behaviour implications of growing levels of cultural diversity, and how cross-cultural marketers might wish to respond to them. This is a huge area of research and it is not possible to cover all the relevant literature, so the emphasis in this chapter is on focusing on a few relevant themes. The first section of the chapter focuses on consumer behaviour and consumer society and the extent to which there has been a convergence across societies. The second theme focuses on the sub-cultural differences in the context of understanding the process of defining ethnic groups and boundaries within multicultural populations referred to in Chapter 1. An important debate is whether consumers will acculturate into the society in which they live or maintain their own culture. A third issue relates to understanding cosmopolitan consumer culture and how it is reflected in different national contexts and consumer groups. Materialism has been an important aspect of what has become known as consumer society. The symbolic role consumption has in consumer societies has important marketing implications and the situation becomes even more complex in cross-cultural contexts.
