Julius Meyward P. Occeño March 1, 2014 Marketing Management Prof. Dominador Gamboa “Marketer Acculturation: The Changer and the Changed”

The global marketplace is consisted of consumers that belong to different cultures and have different behaviors, needs and wants. It is a huge challenge for global companies and marketers to penetrate different types of cultured markets and to the changes that the businesses have to adapt in order to fit in, but it can be an opportunity for them to provide a need that has not yet been realized.
Acculturation, as defined in the article, is a general term that encompasses intercultural interaction and adaptation and includes assimilation of a new culture, maintenance of the old culture, and resistance to both new and old cultures. Global companies entering foreign markets either adapt the marketing mix or the separate elements of it to local markets, or they enter local markets with a standardized marketing campaign. The result is both the marketer adapts to local culture and consequently, presumptions can be made that no or little influence is made, and local consumption patterns and consequently, culture to some extent, probably adapt to those imposed by global marketing.
In reaction to this, consumers do either integrate, assimilate, reject, or become marginalized depending on how they individually react to the host culture that is being introduced and how much of their home culture they retain. Integration can be seen in the case of a global brands being endorsed by local personalities, one example is Nike which is associated with boxing icon Manny Pacquiao. Assimilation can be seen where the host culture have become completely integrated into the home culture, like what McDonald’s has been doing in the Philippines where they offer food items that are not available in other countries like Chicken McDo, McSpaghetti