The first serious book on the subject of the cultural aspects of marketing was written by Jean-Claude Usunier in 1997. It was published more than 20 years after warnings by two other Frenchmen, André Laurent and Michel Crozier, about the limitations of Anglo-Saxon approaches to management and organization theories.
Usunier's book, however, only scratches the surface. His main stance was to compare the differences between cultural systems in which marketing activities unfold. This is very similar to what we will later describe and explain as the multi-local approach: that is, to offer different products or services adapted to each destination culture. Usunier does not resolve the dilemmas that a truly transnational approach requires. Like many other writers, he also refers to culture as a factor affecting business, like other socio-political, financial, ecological, and legal factors.
Culture, based on our research at Trompenaars Hampden-Turner, is not like this; it is not simply a factor like most processes in the transactional environment.
To provide a reliable, generalizable framework that can help the modern marketer, culture must be considered as the context within which all transactions with stakeholders take place. For the transnational organization it changes the entire landscape because it is not just another factor to put into the equation. It is the dominant factor, one that pervades all relationships and behaviors and, importantly, "meaning." Culture challenges the fundamental strategy of marketing, customer relations, definition of product, price, and advertisement. In short, culture is all pervading.
It is not unexpected that marketing, as a discipline, has lagged behind other business disciplines in recognizing the need for it to be rewritten to account for culture. This is partly explained when we remember that it is one of the organizational disciplines that is heavily influenced by (abstract) economic theories. And economists seek general laws that apply universally across (national) boundaries. They prefer to focus their research on similarities rather than on differences.
For example, in On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation (1817) Ricardo described how countries can take advantage of international trade by concentrating on the relative advantage they have with certain products. A frequently quoted example concerns sheets and wine, in England and Portugal respectively. Here the international trade opportunities were better than in their respective home markets. The English wanted Portuguese wine and the Portuguese wanted the output from English cotton mills.
This approach is too simplistic as it implies, firstly, that tastes, preferences, and habits are transferable between countries; secondly, it also implies that there is (real) free trade between nations. As far as these examples go, we obviously know better today. Even now, when wine has become a global product, it still takes the French at least ten times longer to chose the right vintage and grape combination than it does the Dutch, who tend to be more focused on price. Although free trade is talked about a lot by both the European Union and President Bush, the actions of politicians actually reveal the contrary. The clash of cultural identities is perhaps one of the most dominant issues that results in political leaders losing any kind of integrity or respect in the international context, while remaining surprisingly popular (among their supporters) at home.
Unfortunately, even in the more recent and culturally sensitive marketing frameworks published, such as that of Porter (1995), culture is still regarded simply as an add-on. Porter says that competitive advantage is not often generated when national competition is highest and assumes that the factors which determine national predispositions-like miniaturization for the Japanese, consistency for the Americans, style for the French, and taste for the Italians-are also successful internationally. Obviously the international success of Toyota, McDonald's, Chanel, and the pizza might support this, but there are many examples where successful national competition fails to guarantee international success. This is mainly because of the different tastes and preferences of customers in different destination cultures.
WHY DILEMMAS, AND DILEMMAS OF MARKETING? A NEW MODEL OF MARKETING COMPETENCE
Richard Boyatzis' seminal book The Competent Manager (1982) generated a paradigm shift in the quest to identify the characteristics distinguishing superior from average managerial performance, in attempts to identify and construct the "competent" manager. But there is still no agreed definition of the word "competence." Some, such as Boyatzis, define this as "an underlying characteristic of a person." Others, such as Woodruffe (1993) for example, define competency as "a set of behavior patterns that the incumbent needs to bring to a position in order to perform its tasks and functions with competence." And yet others use the terms skill and competence interchangeably.
For example we could consider hotel staff who need to be trained in how to deal with guests as customers. We might then say that a member of staff had the competence to deal with guests and provide customer satisfaction. Or we could consider that even after such training, competence to provide customer satisfaction is how staff actually perform, not simply what they know. They have to perform effectively on a continuous basis, as a result of which they can satisfy the customer even when facing new situations not encountered during their training. Competency, in this respect, is what people actually do, not simply what they know.
And this brings us directly to marketing. What are the competencies needed in order to be effective in marketing in today's ever-globalizing world?
Evidence from our research at THT enables us to build a new conceptual framework relevant to the future of marketing. It is based on these assumptions:
Knowledge and understanding is stored within corporate cultures, especially in the relationships between people and the relationship between the organization and its market.
Marketing strategy consists not of one infallible master plan, or "grand strategy," but in hundreds of trials and tentative initiatives.
Learning occurs when we eliminate the less successful trials and intensify and explore the more successful ones by continuously monitoring feedback from activities. Successful insurance is an unending inquiry into what helps customers and rewards the organization.
Management of change is based on adding value rather than throwing away the value of the old situation.
Our approach to understanding a corporation is to investigate its dilemmas. As we have previously noted, the word dilemma is from the Greek, meaning "two propositions." In our findings all cultures and corporations have developed habitual ways of resolving dilemmas, of being-for example-both well centralized and highly decentralized at the same time. The success of a company will depend, among other things, on both the autonomy of its parts and on how well the information arising from this autonomy has been centralized and coordinated. If you fail to exploit fully centralized information, your scattered operations might as well be totally independent. If various business units are not free to act on local information, then your HQ is subtracting, not adding, value. Any network only justifies itself by fine-tuning the values of decentralized action and centralized intelligence, which is then fed back to the various units.
In this book we will focus on how, by recognizing and respecting cultural differences, marketing professionals have to face a variety of dilemmas in order to be effective.
There are two worlds, each as real as the other. There is the world of facts, of atoms, in which we give statistical expression to hard data. These consist of exclusive categoriziations, either/or, this or that, yielding thousands of annotated objects. Then there is another world, reflective of our languages, a world of information or difference, with no necessary connection to physical objects. These are differences of value, aim, feeling, opinion, perception; a world of contrasts that are binary. Marketing is of this latter world. As we increasingly drown in more and more of our own data, we urgently need an alternative logic in order to generate meaning and knowledge.