Culture Theories in Global Marketing: A Literature-Based Assessment

As the body of international marketing research expands, periodic reviews are helpful for assessing the state of knowledge and identifying future courses of action. Particularly useful are efforts to examine theories, which reflect a field’s most fundamental concerns and contemplated solutions. One set of theories garnering current attention centers on culture. Culture theories, such as Hofstede’s (1980, 2001) universal values of individualism, masculinity, power distance, and uncertainty avoidance, help explain and predict a host of market and marketing behaviors within and across countries, including consumer innovativeness, brand credibility, and global advertising effectiveness (Alden et al., 1993; Erdem et al., 2006; Steenkamp et al., 1999). As Clark (1990) notes, culture theories offer a versatile means to study both managerial and buyer issues in global marketing. Moreover, they promise coherence and make sense of the interesting, yet detached, fragments of the many existing multicountry studies. As an integrating framework, culture offers a means to strengthen the theoretical underpinnings of global marketing, a discipline that repeatedly has been criticized as conceptually shallow (Albaum and Peterson, 1984; Sheth 2001; Wang, 1999).