January/ February 2007

Where you’re going, where you’ve been

Using cultural understanding, marketers foresee product acceptance

Michael Hitt The exchange of foreign goods is a process that affects all businesses to some degree, and it’s common knowledge that different cultures perceive products differently. So what if you could predict how your consumer would respond before ever making that first sales pitch? According to a conceptual research piece from Mays Associate Professor of Marketing James Leigh, impressions of foreign goods are often made through identification with an individualist or collectivist culture, and then swayed by life events.

External factors such as war and natural disasters affect our attitude toward products from those regions, while age may play a part in determining their level and length of impact. That’s what Leigh finds in a study, “The Impact of Attributions about Life Events on Perceptions of Foreign Products: Contrasts in Individualism and Collectivism.”

The foundation of one’s opinion of goods lies within their culture, and as Leigh explains, your own culture affects your perception of other cultures. People from individualist cultures, such as the U.S. and U.K., tend to be less apt to exclude products from other countries, while folks from collectivist cultures like China are likely to side with their own nation’s goods over others. The degree of identification with collective or individual roots, though, may vary.

“People differ in different degrees,” Leigh said. “In the U.S. we are predominately individualist, but I think certain people may have a tinge of collectivism in their mindset. You don’t fall into one category just because you’re an American.”

In addition, cultures as a whole display different levels of group mindsets. “Australia probably goes to the degree of being the most individualistic,” Leigh said. “But there are also people there from China and Japan who are from different Pacific Rim cultures, and so it’s a hodge-podge of all of those.”

In his research, Leigh uses basic cultural stereotypes to determine different modes of identification by incorporating internal influences—such as age, marital status and employment—to determine how people from different cultures will react to the same external life events, like a natural disaster or a shocking social incident.

Because older people have more life experiences in their memory banks, he explains, they may be impacted in a larger way than youth. People who have gone through certain life changing events, such as war, might retain an impression of products from certain nations because of their past experiences with people from that area.

Americans who lived through World War II, he explains, may feel like products from Japan are of poor quality. But the individualist youth, who don’t have this negative memory, tend not to carry on the bias toward Japanese products. Many youth from collectivist countries such as Korea, though, still exhibit their elders’ negative opinions of opposing wartime countries.

“Just because people might harbor a feeling, it doesn’t have to stay that way,” Leigh said.

With the steady increase in international product exchange, understanding the stereotypical perceptions and the history of relationships between countries and markets is vital. And knowing where your consumer is “coming from,” both literally and figuratively, can make or break your business transactions.

Leigh’s research in the January 2007 issue of Psychology and Marketing, is co-authored by 2005 doctoral graduate Yountae Choi, who is now with the University of North Florida.

— Ashley N. Coker


January/ February 2007
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