ABSTRACT
Theodore Levitt’s 1983 article “The globalization of markets” is used frequently as a beginning in the shift of the multinational corporation (MNC) market strategy from international to global market segments. The emphasis was now focused on building the global brand to take advantage of the similarities across national borders and the economies of scale that result from serving large global markets with a single brand identity. Only recently has the pendulum begun to swing back to a position where both global and local brand identity are important players in the market, where competition and choice exist to serve unique cultural groups or market segments. Throughout the decades, research attention on how culture denes meaning in consumption and experiences has swung with the pendulum, providing evidence for similarities across cultures or signicant dierences between cultures based on the context where the consumption occurs and on what overall theory was driving the research. Cultural meaning and perceptions, along with economic conditions and availability of choice, combine into contextual consumption of products and services with unique meanings for the consumers. The importance of a product (or brand) to a consumer lies in the meaning associated with the product as well as the associated products, beliefs and uses. The study of this contextual web of meaning ascribed to products and the meaning in consumption is the focus of the chapter. Cross-cultural consumption is a fragmented and woefully underdeveloped area, where researchers occasionally either take their primary line of inquiry “across the border” in a comparative study or delve into a deeply descriptive single population study that replicates earlier work on the majority population and results in a cross-cultural extension of their work. As a result, there has been no focused development of theory unique to this area but a collection of studies that enlighten our understanding of how the cultural context of consumption is critical in understanding the meaning ascribed to consumption practices. Research methods and measures have morphed as well – a change primarily driven by advances in technology allowing more complicated approaches to data. New techniques have been developed that span attributes and interviews across multiple national samples while controlling for dierences inherent to crosscultural research, such as response bias, measurement equivalence and translation errors.
