Multicultural Perspectives in Customer Behaviour

With globalisation taking centre stage in the business world and multiculturalism affecting markets and societies, there is a need to understand the ways that customers respond to the changing marketplace from international and multicultural perspectives. This book is timely in addressing important themes raised in the most recent marketing literature, such as: global consumer culture, and the impact of Western culture on consumer behaviour in other countries; consumer acculturation processes, and the impact on identity conflicts and the strategies people use to manage them; globalisation vs. localised strategies, and the interaction of local and global influences on customer behaviour; climate change and global warming, the impact on consumer behaviour, and the implications for social responsibility; and cross-cultural customer research, including important methodological questions around the application of sociological, group-level measures to psychological, individual-level phenomenon in marketing contexts. The papers in this edition address those themes, reporting on studies from a range of countries, including Germany, Greece, China, and Austria, and a number of cultural groups in the UK. These papers draw on quantitative and qualitative methodologies, reflecting the full range of methods employed in contemporary consumer research. This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Marketing Management.

Table of Contents:
1. Introduction: Multicultural perspectives in customer behaviour Maria G. Piacentini and Charles C. Cui 2. Material man is not an island: Coping with cultural fracture Andrea Davies and James A Fitchett 3. A comparative examination of consumer decision styles in Austria Rudolf R. Sinkovics, Kannika ‘Mink’ Leelapanyalert and Mo Yamin 4. Do brand names in a foreign language lead to different brand perceptions? Laura Salciuviene, Pervez N. Ghauri, Ruth Salomea Streder and Claudio De Mattos 5. Consuming Bollywood: Young Sikhs social comparisons with heroes and heroines in Indian films Amandeep Takhar, Pauline Maclaran, Elizabeth Parsons and Anne Broderick 6. Exploring appropriation of global cultural rituals Julie Tinson and Peter Nuttall 7. The interrelationship between desired and undesired selves and consumption: The case of Greek female consumers’ experiences Katerina Karanika and Margaret K. Hogg 8. Self-gift giving in China and the UK: Collectivist versus individualist orientations Caroline Tynan, M. Teresa Pereira Heath, Christine Ennew, Fangfang Wang and Luping Sun 9. Death and disposal: The universal, environmental dilemma Louise Canning and Isabelle Szmigin 10. Researching consumers in multicultural societies: Emerging methodological issues Stephanie Slater and Mirella Yani-de-Soriano