ABSTRACT
The focus of this chapter is to explore some of the ways that culture can be analysed within a cross-cultural marketing context. The first task is to define what culture means taking into account historical patterns of thought and the contribution of different countries in arriving at the definitions that we use today. A second theme of this chapter is to explore the notion of national culture. Using the nation as a geographical unit of analysis and equating it with a distinctive culture is widely practised in marketing. Indeed within marketing cross-cultural and cross-national are often used interchangeably in books and research papers. The idea of a national culture is a concept that is of quite recent origin and some would argue is not sophisticated enough to deal with an increasingly culturally complex world. A third theme of this chapter is to assess what has become known as the globalization of culture. The globalization of culture was an idea that gained considerable currency in the 1980s, and refers to the way that global communications networks have resulted in a homogenized world of standardized products, advertising messages, and retail formats. The widespread use of the Internet is exacerbating these tendencies resulting in the globalization culture that supersedes local cultural differences. The fourth theme of the chapter is to consider what has become known as the glocalization of culture. This approach emerged largely as a critique of the globalization thesis which is arguably something of a blunt instrument. Supporters of glocalization maintain that it is still important to engage with differentiated local markets within the context of a globalizing world.
