Global behaviour, unique responses: consumption within cultural frameworks

Abstract

Increasingly, product managers and promotional strategists weigh the impacts of homogeneous products and uniform promotion coupled with the unique character of specific market segments. This is especially crucial in an era when many products are advertised in identical ways and consumed in analogous manners over diverse cultural areas. In order to explore the influence of cultural variations on marketing, discusses the conflicting ways in which an international advertising icon, “the Marlboro man”, is interpreted in three different cultural settings. The resulting analysis has both theoretical and practical value.