CULTURE DOES NOT MATTER

“Your culture is your brand” -Tony Hsieh
A culture is a way of life of a group of people-the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next.
A key factor is the extent to which you draw upon cultural versus personal knowledge when making purchasing decisions.
With shared set of ideas, we also have personal knowledge that can conflict with accepted, culturally derived practices. For example, a boy growing up in China may generally accept the importance of his relationships with others, and therefore seek to keep harmony with family members. But more personal knowledge — such as being exposed to pictures of American cultural icons like Green Day or Madonna — may lead him to sometimes wear clothes that his parents don't like. In other words, when pressured to form a quick judgment, we generally rely on cultural norms as a "default." But when making a thoughtful deliberation, we're more likely to engage in an internal debate, and waver.

CULTURE DOES MATTER

According to Marieke de Mooij, in a globalized world where everything has become standardized, culture is the driving force behind the requirement of market research and defines why some brands exist in a country whereas others go unrecognized. Culture is the by-product of hardened beliefs of a set of people who define themselves separately from others. Behaviour plays a minor functional role as a part of culture. For example in Japan, the culture is more towards individualistic nature and therefore the behaviour exhibited by Japanese involves pride and respect over material wealth, whereas in countries such as Philippines the culture is more oriented towards family and community. Therefore in Philippines the behaviour is more extroverted and probing. When marketers enter such new areas it is important that they understand the nuances of the country and demography otherwise they can end up in trouble. Here are some reasons why culture plays such an important role:

CONVERGENCE Vs DIVERGENCE : * It is evidenced that economic systems homogenization will lead to homogenization of consumer behavior. It is also seen that there are large consumption differences among countries that are stable over time or countries that are diverging. * The convergence and divergence is measured in terms of consumption, ownership and usage of large number of products and services across countries at various points in time using several several parameter like the standard metric is coefficient of variation (CV), which is standard deviation of the variable divided by its mean. * The analysis suggests that only few products showed convergence across countries (CV