CHAPTER

THREE

Cultural Influence on
Consumer
Behavior
 What is Culture?

• “the accumulation of
shared meanings, rituals,
norms, and traditions”
• “a society’s personality”

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 Relevance of Culture to Consumer
Behavior
1) Culture determines overall priorities a consumer attaches to
different activities and products
2) Consumers embrace products and services that resonate with
a culture’s priorities
3) Products can reflect underlying cultural processes of a
particular period, e.g. Wearing national cloths in Pahela
Baishakh
5) Consumers purchase many products and services because they
believe these products will help to attain a cultural value-
related goal

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 Cultural Systems
• The collection of beliefs, knowledge, norms, values, and material
objects that defines a given culture. Three functional areas of a
cultural system:
1) Ecology
– the way a system adapts to its habitat (E.g. Having fancy
curtains, large kitchen)
2) Social structure
– the way orderly social life is maintained. (E.g. Male
dominance)
3) Ideology
1) the way people relate to their environment and social groups
2) their worldview (principles of order and fairness) and ethos (a
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set of moral and aesthetic principles).
 Cultural Values

• Values
– Beliefs that some condition is preferable to its
opposite
– General ideas about good and bad goals
• Core values
– Values that uniquely define a culture as opposed to
“cultural universals”

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 Learning Cultural Values

• Cultural influences build up throughout our lives

• People internalize prevailing cultural values into their personal
values through various learning mechanisms, such as:
1) Enculturation
• the process of learning the beliefs and behaviors endorsed by one’s
own culture.
2) Acculturation
• the process of learning the value system and behaviors of another
culture.
• Socialization agents (people & institutions that impart beliefs
to us, including parents, friends, and teachers) play a key role
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 Norms
• Basic concept in the social normative system
• Refer to guides or rules for behaving in certain situations
• Dictate what is right or wrong, acceptable or
unacceptable
• Typically enforced through sanctions
• Basic catagories of norms:
1) Fads and fashion
2) Folkways
3) Mores (Mor-ays)
4) Laws
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 Types of Norms

1) Mores
– Apply to more significant behaviors and subject to more
intense sanctions if violated
– Tend to be associated with moral and religious values;
taboos (e.g. nudity, child gender selection)
2) Folkways/Customs & Conventions
– Norms for routine everyday activities, e.g. how to greet
a stranger, how to dress in a business setting.
– Subject to only informal sanctions

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 The Culture Production System

• The set of individuals and organizations responsible for creating

and marketing a cultural product
• Has three major subsystems:
1) Creative subsystem—responsible for generating new symbols
and/or products.
2) Managerial subsystem—responsible for selecting, making
tangible, mass producing, and managing the distribution of new
symbols and/or products.
3) Communications subsystem—responsible for giving meaning to
the new product and providing it with a symbolic set of
attributes that are communicated to consumers.
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 The Culture Production Process

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 Cultural Stories and Ceremonies

• Every culture develops stories and

ceremonies that help its members to make
sense of the world.
– Stories lead to development of myths
– Ceremonies consist of rituals

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 Myths

• Stories with symbolic elements that represent the

shared emotions/ideals of a culture
• Story characteristics
– Conflict between opposing forces
– Outcome is moral guide for people
– Myth reduces anxiety by providing guidelines

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 Rituals
• Sets of multiple, symbolic behaviors that occur in a fixed
sequence and that tend to be repeated periodically
• Many consumer activities are ritualistic, e.g. trips to
Starbucks, Sunday brunch
• Other more structured common rituals discussed in the
text relate to:
1) Grooming
2) Gift-giving
3) Holiday celebrations
4) Rites of passage
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 Gift-Giving Rituals
• A form of economic exchange - giver transfers an item of value to a
recipient, who must reciprocate.
• Also involves a symbolic exchange.

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 Rites of Passage

• Rituals that mark a change in social status

• Every society sets aside times when these passages
occur. Marketers attempt to reach consumers during
these passage times.

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 Holiday Rituals

• Holidays are filled with rituals unique to those

occasions that often commemorate a cultural myth.
Some of the most ritualistic ones are noted:
1) Christmas
2) Halloween
3) Valentine’s Day
4) Thanksgiving
5) Eid Day
6) Pahela Baisakh
7) Durga Puja
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 Sacred and Profane Consumption

• Sacred consumption
– involves objects and events that are “set apart”
from normal activities and are treated with some
degree of respect or awe.
• Profane consumption
- involves consumer objects and events that are
ordinary and not special

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 Sacralization

• Occurs when ordinary objects, events, and

even people take on sacred meaning
• Takes a number of forms:
• Objectification occurs when we attribute
sacred qualities to mundane items, through
processes like contamination
• Collecting is the systematic acquisition of a
particular object or set of objects
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 Desacralization

• When a sacred item/symbol is removed from its

special place or is duplicated in mass quantities
(becomes profane)

• Religion has somewhat become desacralized

– Christmas as a secular, materialistic occasion

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 Taking a Global Approach

• Learning other cultures is essential to a successful marketing

effort because ignoring cultural sensitivities can be costly.
• As corporations compete around the world, we ask should an
organization develop separate marketing plans for each
culture or should it craft a single plan to use everywhere
• Should marketers use a standardized strategy around the
world or adopt a localized strategy?

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 Standardization vs. Localization

• Standardization
– Keeping marketing mix elements the same in
both the firm’s home market and foreign
markets served (or across foreign markets)
– Assumes that cultures are so homogenized that
the same approach will work throughout the
world
– Based on an etic perspective, which focuses on
commonalities across cultures.

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 Standardization vs. Localization

• Localization/Customization
– Adapting marketing mix elements to suit local
requirements in foreign markets serve
– Assumes that each country has a national
character, or a distinctive set of behavior and
personality characteristics, so a marketer should
tailor the strategy to the sensibilities of the culture
– Based on an emic perspective, which focuses on
variations across cultures.
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