When we set down a product or marketing plan from one culture in another, the underlying assumptions of the culture in which it is placed will give it new meaning. This meaning is often puzzling and disturbing to the culture that invented it. The meaning of explicit "artefacts of culture" is completely dependent upon the underlying assumptions of implicit culture.
The seven dimensions model is described in Chapters 2 and 3 and is intended to provide a framework for exploring commonly shared problem areas in a structured way. Tensions arising from these cultural differences generate the dilemmas that marketers have to face.
They arise from the meaning of relationships between people, time orientation, and nature.
When marketers know the personal cultural profile of both their target customers and themselves, and can respect the differences, they are well on the way to developing cross-cultural competence and being much more effective.
So future marketers who are plying their function across cultures need to develop and then demonstrate an "adequateness" (adaequatio) for dilemmas-"that is, the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing being known" (adaequatio rei et intellectus: Plotinus, AD 270). To clarify, some people are incapable of appreciating a piece of music, not because they are deaf, but because of lack of adaequatio; the sense of hearing perceives nothing more than a succession of notes, whereas the music is grasped by intellectual powers. Some people possess these powers to such a degree that they can grasp an entire symphony simply on the strength of reading the score, while to others it is just a noise. The former is adequate to the music but the latter is inadequate.
For all of us, only those patterns and dynamics in organizations exist for which we have sufficient "adequateness." Effective marketing managers need to possess adequateness for reconciling dilemmas. For example, they won't try to win an argument with a customer; real leadership isn't about winning arguments.
What marketing has to achieve is the creation of wealth through the relationships between people and what they value. A product or service is a distillation of reconciled values offered to customers through relationships. (On a larger level in our dangerous world of polarizing differences, where hatreds have grown murderous, we must bridge new chasms if these are not to engulf us.) Effective behaviors that result in the reconciliation of contrasting values, we call transcultural competence, although this can include differences that are not necessarily rooted in the cultures of nation states. Through the integration of values into ever larger systems of satisfaction we can develop our new theory of marketing.
A NEW THEORY OF MARKETING
In this book we will offer a framework for rethinking the marketing approach for the transnational organization. We will look at some of the basic aspects of marketing-such as customer relations, market research, branding, etc. By treating culture as a context rather than a factor, we will consider the dilemmas faced by organizations when locating themselves in new markets.
For this purpose we need to extend the earlier definition of marketing. It now needs to include the system of activities which facilitates human interaction and information between products/services on the one hand and markets on the other. Therefore it goes beyond the original, Anglo-Saxon, meaning of how to get a product or service into a market.
There has been much discussion as to whether markets will ever globalize. Even when products and services tend to become more similar over time, and there is no doubt that this is happening, customers seem to have different reasons for buying similar products. Indeed the cultural factor is so dominant that some authors doubt there will ever be a converging taste across all customers, around the world.
In 1986 Michael Porter was very precise in observing dramatic change in international trade patterns. He concluded that within business, multidomestic home markets were themselves developing into global markets. In this respect, Usunier agrees with Porter that this development is much more of a "push" from organizations trying to integrate their production processes on all levels of the value chain, than a pull from the consumer (Usunier, 1997).
Obviously these trends have been dependent on the continued lowering of trade thresholds such as GATT and recently the European Union. In a freely competing world market, many organizations are forced to enter the international competitive arena in order to create synergies and lower costs by economies of scale. Add the internationalization of media to this process and there is little that can stop the push for an organization to internationalize.
It is difficult to ignore the fact that this process of increasing global competition has been increasing over the last three decades or so. Macroeconomic data support the proposition that international and regional trade has increased significantly faster than the accumulated GNPs of those countries trading. Economic integration across cultural boundaries and, therefore, global competition has increased significantly as a result. Similar macroeconomic data suggest that this situation has occurred even more so in many regions-Europe in particular, with the fall of the Berlin Wall and the integration of European markets. Nonetheless similar patterns are also unfolding in the Asia-Pacific region and in North and Middle America (NAFTA).
The reasons for this type of globalization have typically been based on internal business economic strategies. The first phase, in the 1960s and 70s, was initiated by multinationals who delegated much of their authority to their local generating companies in order to be as close to the market as possible. The country managers, being lords of local fiefdoms, exploited their authority by emphasizing that decentralization was the most relevant strategy in order to have the ability to able to react properly to their unique local market circumstances. Then in the 80s, under the doctrines of McKinsey and the like, a big centralization move was initiated. It was claimed that multi-local approaches needed to be replaced by centralized processes in order to achieve any global economies of scale. Here we can see the fundamental dilemma of globalizing. On the one hand, globalization is stimulated by production processes that are consistent throughout the organization to save costs; on the other hand, we find the obvious responses for sales and marketing people to adapt their products and services to the needs of local customers.
This dilemma hasn't vanished, despite the fact that two interesting global developments have occurred since the 1980s. Firstly a further increase of global integration, especially in the late 90s, occurred across cultural and company borders with the merger and acquisition wave. Secondly, and also in the 90s, there was a fundamental increase in the mobility of people. Within Europe this particularly came after the fall of the Berlin Wall, but there has also been an enormous influx of immigrant labor moving from (Northern) Africa to the European continent. In major cities like London, Paris, Amsterdam, or Berlin a significant part of the population do not have native-born parents.
There has also been a fundamental breakthrough of both mass media (aimed at particular groups, like MTV and CNN) and the Internet. This, obviously, has affected the internationalization of marketing. However it would be too easy to say that the markets have driven organizations to globalize. Globalization, even today, is still driven by increased global competition and simultaneous global restructuring processes. Patterns of consumption are simply difficult to globalize without any adaptation, due to national external factors such as legal, advertising, and distribution. However markets do appear, in some ways, to globalize as well-look at the converging patterns of fashion, consumerism, music, and education. For example a typical marketing organization such as Unilever rationalizes its number of brands and McDonald's continues to open new outlets outside the USA. But is there enough evidence to claim that the globalization of marketing is going hand-in-hand with the corresponding organizational processes of global integration (in spite of pressure groups who are against globalization at any cost)?