Consumer trends have undergone through constant changes over the last few years as globalisation continues to influence consumption behaviours. A modern-day shopping mall in Shanghai, such as ALDI, offers a comparable customer experience as ALDI's store in Germany. This trend transcends in many other shopping malls globally due to globalised retail stores and product lines.
Online market spaces also provide parallel browsing and e-consumption experiences globally. Shavitt and Barnes (2020) postulate that new consumption behaviours and preferences depict globalised trends and convergences, especially in the retail sector. Despite these commonalities, the concept of global consumer identity manifests unique features that have considerable impacts on consumption behaviours at regional and global scales.
Consumer identity and cultural dynamics
Global branding strategies, consumer identity, and culture
Conclusion
Reference List
Introduction
Consumer trends have undergone through constant changes over the last few years as globalisation continues to influence consumption behaviours. A modern-day shopping mall in Shanghai, such as ALDI, offers a comparable customer experience as ALDI's store in Germany. This trend transcends in many other shopping malls globally due to globalised retail stores and product lines (Kaelberer, 2017). Online market spaces also provide parallel browsing and e-consumption experiences globally. Shavitt and Barnes (2020) postulate that new consumption behaviours and preferences depict globalised trends and convergences, especially in the retail sector. Despite these commonalities, the concept of global consumer identity manifests unique features that have considerable impacts on consumption behaviours at regional and global scales.
Consumer identity
According to Reed II et al. (2012), identity is a psychological construct that differentiates individuals from others. It constitutes personal or individual beliefs, temperaments, and values that inform human behaviour. The process of identity construction occurs through conflict, verification, association, relevance, and salience that continue to define and express the self (Reed II et al. 2012; Shavitt and Barnes, 2020). In marketing, consumer identity research focuses on factors influencing consumption behaviours, beliefs, and values. Consumer identity represents self-association behaviours that portray a clear indication of a person’s product and brand preferences. For example, students and young people align their consumption identities with brands that represent their political and social affiliations (Escalas et al., 2013). Durmaz (2014) confers that the consumer is the primary reason why organisations exist. This trend has led to corporates aligning their products and global marketing campaigns along their brands to match consumerism culture. To this end, studying consumer identity dynamics between localised and globalised influences is fundamental to today’s global branding practices.
Consumer identity and cultural dynamics
A culture constitutes a set of shared values, beliefs, and significances by people in a particular space and time. It is an essential psychological process that creates a locus for instituting common standards for behaviours, interactions, and motivations. This conception includes social institutes and cultural artefacts that shape or include the psychological forces in consumer decision-making, attitudes, perceptions, and preferences (Bragg et al., 2016). Culture exhibits dominant impacts on human desires and behaviours. This dominance happens due to prolonged socialisation processes, whereby a child is inducted to specific lingual customs, regulations, rituals, and customs. As an illustration, American cultural preferences such as food, religion, and politics differ significantly from European culture. Europeans are not as religious as Americans are. The British adore tea but coffee dominates the American’s culture (Smith, 1992). For example, some cultures have dietary restrictions based on religion or traditional practices and consumers from these cultures won’t indulge in certain foods. Such trends demonstrates why beverage companies engage in specific branding strategies that correspond with the target consumer’s cultural values and preferences.
However, a person begins to develop individualist self-constructs by distinguishing between “we” and “I” due to acculturation, leading to various subcultural units that demonstrate overlapping micro and macro social self-conceptions (Reed II et al., 2012). Consumers follow similar trajectories to weave unique consumption habits and subcultures from broad societal backgrounds such as ethnicity, race, and spiritual beliefs (Shavitt and Barnes, 2020). Thus, culture affects consumers’ values, purchasing goals, product perceptions, and motivations. Given that culture entails mental processes, contextual attributes act as consumption inputs, yielding divergent and convergent consumer identity formulations in global marketplace practices.
Nonetheless, Hofstede’s dimensional model institutes various cultural dimensions that can advance globalised consumption behaviours and self-conceptions. The most acclaimed Hofstede’s cultural dimension is the individualism versus collectivism distinctions, especially through eastern and western societal lenses (De Mooij and Hofstede, 2010; Shavitt and Barnes, 2020). Individualistic cultures advance individualised consumer tendencies, whereby marketers focus on amplifying self-reliant behaviours. Consumers in such environments prefer goods that lead to personal satisfaction and personality development.
In contrast, markets in collectivist cultures, China and India, and other Eastern nations are more receptive to goods that advance mutual social interconnections (Bragg et al., 2016; Reed II et al., 2012; Shavitt and Barnes, 2020). Self-reliant consumer products are more likely to flourish in Western cultures, while collectivist goods and services may perform better in Asian nations. And yet, specific subcultural elements such as nationalist attributes can further influence particular consumption behaviours in the Asian region. For instance, Chinese, Indian, and Malaysian cultures in Singapore have particular effects on the purchasing behaviours among the local consumers (Jung and Kau, 2004). The failure to account for subcultural elements has had an immense impact on the global retailing sector.
While China is increasingly seen through cross-cultural dimensions, Chinese global consumers are still subject to subcultural influences (Zhou et al., 2020). For example, E-bay’s botched attempt to penetrate the Chinese market in 2004 was caused by a wholesale global branding strategy with minimal focus on the subcultural inputs in consumer identity and behaviours. Instead, Alibaba’s Taobao succeeded where E-bay could not perform due to peer-to-peer communication between consumers and buyers (Shavitt and Barnes, 2020, p.3). E-bay's failure and Taoboa's success in China exemplify globalisation's irony in modern-day marketing and branding strategies. This satire warrants a critical understanding of the dynamics between customer identities, culture, and global branding strategies in today's international markets.
- Citation du texte
- Anonyme,, 2021, Consumer Identity and Global Branding Strategies, Munich, GRIN Verlag, https://www.grin.com/document/1276183
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