Marieke de Mooij and Geert Hofstede

During the past decades business schools have delivered graduates that believe in global homogenization of consumer behavior. It is one of the greatest myths of global marketing taught in international marketing courses. Despite a lack of empirical evidence, authors of textbooks on international marketing and consumer behavior tend to express their belief that convergence of national wealth, technologies, and media across borders will lead to global consumers with similar consumption and media behavior. This lack of cultural sensitivity in education and training of managers and marketing executives has led to failures and loss of profit in the internationalization processes of several companies. Recent examples are Ford, Coca-Cola, and C&A.

Although analysis of consumption data across borders demonstrates that countries converge for some durable products and new technologies at a macro level (ownership of products per 1,000 people), the analysis also demonstrates that countries diverge with respect to how people use these durable products. For example, in the developed world, and in particular in economically homogeneous Europe, the numbers of television sets per 1,000 people are similar across countries, but the numbers of hours people watch television are very different. With respect to the numbers of radios per 1,000 people, countries have diverged since 1970. Even though people read more newspapers as national wealth increases, the differences in newspaper readership across countries have remained relatively constant since 1950. Although the numbers of automobiles per 1,000 people have become similar across the various countries in the developed world, the numbers of automobiles per family and preferences for type of automobile vary enormously. In the packaged goods sector, except for a few categories such as soft drinks and household cleaning products, the differences across countries are also large. These differences are not disappearing. With converging national wealth, differences in consumption can no longer be explained by economic differences; they can only be explained by cultural differences.

Currently there are models of national culture that enable marketing executives to quantify the effects of culture and explain and manage consumption differences at a country level. A model that was developed for management purposes and frequently applied to international marketing is that of Hofstede. This model explains much of the variation in consumption and consumer behavior across countries. Examples include the variation in consumption of various food products, drinks such as mineral water and soft drinks, ownership of many durable products and luxury articles, media usage and the Internet, the degree of innovativeness, brand loyalty, and variation in preferences for national and global brands or private label brands.

Analyses of the influence of national wealth and culture on consumption at a country level over time show that when countries converge with respect to national wealth, cultural variables increasingly explain differences in country-level behavior. Computer ownership, for example, is converging across countries, although the differences are still mainly related to national wealth. How people use computers varies, as does use of the Internet, with usage differences being related to cultural differences.

These findings are important for the internationalization process of companies and retailers, especially when planning to market new products or services across countries. The cultural variety of the countries worldwide as well as in Europe implies that success in one country does not automatically mean success in other countries. Instead of mapping countries according to regional proximity or economic development, mapping according to cultural characteristics is more effective. Retailers, even more than marketers of branded goods, need to be close to their customers and should not risk standardizing their products and services in the global marketplace or transferring a formula originating in one culture into another without adaptation.