Donnel A. Briley

Bridging the Culture Chasm: Ensuring that Consumers are Healthy, Wealthy and Wise

This article pulls together streams of culture-related research found in information-processing and behavioral decision theory literature, and it complements them with a focus on motivations and goals. The authors propose a framework that suggests that (1) the treatment of culture is useful when it incorporates subcultures, including those defined by nationality, ethnicity, religious affiliation, and neighborhood or local surroundings; (2) goals are determined by both cultural background and situational forces; and (3) through its impact on goals, culture influences the inputs used to make a decision, the types of options preferred, and the timing of decisions. The authors highlight the implications of the framework for two policy domains: health and finances. They suggest that consumers’ goal orientations can provide a useful segmentation dimension, and they carve out specific tendencies that appear to vary across cultural contexts (e.g., satisficing, goal shifting, reactivity). A deeper consideration of consumer goals and the role of culture in individual decision making can inform policies aimed at improving the quality of consumers’ decisions and, ultimately, consumer welfare.

Cultural Change and Marketing

ABSTRACT The results of this study suggest that marketing strategies need to be adjusted to changing cultures. Culture affects marketing decisions regarding product, price, promotion and place (the 4 Ps). Many marketing studies have been reported based on Hofstedes seminal work on national culture (1980). Marketing managers need to be cautious about assuming the validity of the Anglo cluster equating the cultures of the United States (U.S.) and Canada. We should recognize that national cultures are changing in the U.S., Canada and Mexico, as well as most other countries in the world. Our findings for a very recent sample of people attending executive and MBA programs would seem to apply to the upwardly-mobile business class. Contrary to the ubiquitous Hofstede data found in textbooks, we found no significant differences in Power Distance between the U.S., Mexico and Canada. Our findings regarding differences in Uncertainty Avoidance show that Mexico did not have a significantly higher mean than the U.S., but that the U.S. had a higher mean than Canada. The U.S. and Canada did not differ significantly on Individualism/Collectivism. Our results suggest that caution should be taken in automatically assuming cultural parity between the U.S. and Canada and that established cultural positions between the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) member nations may be changing.

Cultural Influence on Consumer Motivations: A Dynamic View

An understanding of the differences in the norms and values that predominate across societies can provide important theoretical and practical insights to those interested in the international environment. Recognizing this opportunity, researchers have identified various dichotomous value dimensions by administering extensive survey questionnaires to respondents from several different countries, then analyzing the responses to isolate those value characteristics that presumably differentiate one society from another. Hofstede (1980) completed seminal work in this research domain, prompting similar large-scale efforts, including the Cross Cultural Connection’s study of 22 countries (Bond, 1987), the GLOBE study of 62 countries (House et al., 2004), and Shalom Schwartz’s study of 38 countries (Schwartz, 1994, 1999).

Factors Affecting Judgments of Prevalence and Representation: Implications for Public Policy and Marketing

Public policies are typically established to eliminate important social problems (e.g., minority discrimination, crime, poverty). In addition, the importance of these problems, and urgency people feel about addressing them, is influenced by perceptions of their prevalence. These perceptions, however, can be unwittingly biased by extraneous sources of information that lead some people to either overestimate or underestimate the seriousness of the problem at hand. The authors review empirical work on the construction of perceptions of frequency and representativeness and the processes that underlie them. They show that these perceptions are often biased in ways that differ over segments of the population. They conclude with a discussion of implications of these findings for developing public policy initiatives and de-biasing strategies.