Consumer Behavior and Culture : Consequences for Global Marketing and Advertising

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Summary: Handbook for global marketers
Review: Consumer Behavior and Culture-Consequences for Global Marketing and Advertising is a handbook for all global marketers and the researches that did the cross cultural research especially in consumer behavior. As the author, Marieke de Mooij is the fellow of Hofstede, in this book therefore, mostly the Hofstede: Five Dimensions of National Culture is fully explained and utilized. De Mooij tried to explain every aspect in consumer behavior by these dimension, especially individualism vs collectivism, power distance, uncertainty avoidance. For marketers, understand these three dimensions can understand the characteristic of the value, lifestyle and even the attitude towards the objects.

This book unlike other consumer behavior textbook, it does not only describe the basic consumer behavior theories and models but also have lots of application and more focus on culture aspects.

De Mooij also provides lots of examples and successful cases to illustrate the concept. And some positioning maps are also used especially the country positioning. She has tried to use the map to illustrate the culture feature in different countries, such approaches can help marketers to compare the distance among different countries and learn how to adjust and localize their strategies in specific market.

Moreover, the author specific designs some chapters for global marketers. In those chapters, marketers can learn the characteristic of that market customers, and how to base on that unique feature to design the marketing strategies i.e. brand, product and price and advertising strategies i.e. media.

For researcher, this is a good book, the author has described the research methodology for culture-comparison, other than that, she has collected lots of secondary data to support the new data, therefore, the knowledge provided is very comprehensive. In every category like clothing, coffee and automobile, she also mentioned some tips for researchers to do research in that specific area. Some limitations of existing research findings are raised, which help the researches to remind some major limitations and the room for future research.

Overall speaking, the content is very comprehensive, and the description and analysis are good enough for readers to understand the concepts. Moreover, the main points and the sub points are clearly defined, which bring lots of convenient to the readers.

In conclusion, Consumer Behavior and Culture is a handbook for marketers and researchers, and at this moment, there is no other books can substitute it.