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VIEWPOINT

Why marketers need a new

concept of culture for the global
knowledge economy

A new concept of
culture

563

Nigel Holden
Nottingham Business School, Nottingham Trent University,
Nottingham, UK
Keywords International marketing, Culture (sociology), Marketing management,
Knowledge management
Abstract Marketers are berated for their dependence on Hofstede and his concept of culture
which stems from nineteenth century anthropology. International marketing studies need a new
approach to culture, which is consistent with the workings of the global knowledge economy. It is
argued that it is no longer satisfactory to associate culture with markets perceived as national
aggregates of characteristics. Rather culture is seen as a knowledge resource waiting to be
discovered in marketing relationships and clusters of affinity. A five-point scheme for the
foundation of a new approach to culture is presented.

Introduction
When marketers discuss culture in an international context, the name of Hofstede is
invariably invoked and his dimensions are applied with the authority of holy writ. Just
a few recent issues of International Marketing Review reveal that Hofstedes (1980)
work has been cited with reference to a staggeringly wide range of marketing topics:
.
gender stereotyping in advertising (Odekerken-Schroder et al., 2002);
.
service quality (Smith and Reynolds, 2002);
.
globalization (Javalgi and White, 2002);
.
the country of origin effect (Balabanis et al., 2002; Ahmed et al., 2004);
.
new product development (Yeniyurt and Townsend, 2003);
.
global product teams (Sivakumar and Nakata, 2003);
.
export information utilization (Diamantopoulis et al., 2003);
.
standardization of marketing strategy (Ryans et al., 2003);
.
the influence of the retail environment (Jin and Sternquist, 2003);
.
consumer patronage of ethnic portals (Dou et al., 2003);
.
internet buying behaviour (Park and Jun, 2003);
.
international business negotiations (Reynolds et al., 2003);
.
business negotiations between northern Europeans and the Chinese (Kumar and
Worm, 2003);
.
negotiation approaches (Lin and Miller, 2003); and
.
sales training in Europe (Roman and Ruiz, 2003).

International Marketing Review

Vol. 21 No. 6, 2004
pp. 563-572
q Emerald Group Publishing Limited
0265-1335
DOI 10.1108/02651330410568015

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There is no professor of marketing who competes with Hofstede in terms of citations

when it comes to the matter of culture and international marketing. So it is interesting
that one of the most cited scholars in the field of international marketing as a discipline
is in fact a non-marketer. The dependence on the Dutch guru is extraordinary. First, he
investigated work values as mediated via the employees in IBM, which he code-named
Hermes, and so the context of his investigations was not a market (i.e. a terrain of
supply and demand). Second, he was accordingly not scientifically interested in the
employees of Hermes as consumers, negotiators or market intermediaries. Third, his
data were collected in the mid to late 1960s: they therefore attach to a business world in
which globalisation, the internet and the knowledge economy were a thing of the
future.
When the prodigious work Cultures Consequences was published in 1980 (Hofstede,
1980), markets and marketing were quite different entities than they are today. The
know-how of marketing sprang overwhelmingly from consumer behaviour; there was
no such thing as B2B marketing or relational marketing; Levitt (1983) had yet not
written his seminal article on the globalisation of markets; in Europe, as opposed to the
USA, marketing as a management discipline was not on a secure footing. International
marketing had a hazy profile; it was virtually synonymous as a sub-discipline and a
management practice with exporting. But by 1980 Johansson and Wiedersheim-Paul
(1975) had already produced their influential study on the internationalisation of the
firm. Their paper would lay a foundation for development almost exclusively in
Europe of marketing theory in terms of a relationships and network approach.
Hofstede: all too blindly followed
All in all, when Cultures Consequences was published, marketers were not
significantly interested in culture, but a major research stream was beginning to
unfold: the Europe-based IMP Group studied international buyer-seller relationships in
industrial settings, whose members produced their earliest significant writings as of
the 1970s (see: Hakansson, 1982). The IMP Group were interested in culture in these
international relationships, but sensibly they treated it as a natural aspect of
international business relationships. They did not regard cultural difference as
something inherently divisive and menacing. However, that invidious way of seeing
culture was waiting just round the corner.
By the early 1980s a new marketing force swept all before it. It emanated from that
resource-starved fringe of scraggly islands off the east coast . . . of Eurasia, as a
former US ambassador to that country put it (Reischauer, 1984). We are talking of
course about Japan. Looking back, it was as if the great Japanese corporations had
overnight swamped the world with their cars, electronic goods and one of their great
secret weapons marketing mystique. The Japanese seemed to outmanoeuvre the
Americans and the Europeans in the great game of marketing. Kotler et al. (1986) were
spurred on to writing their version of Japanese marketing, lamenting and fretting that
Japanese companies were capturing traditional markets, as if US corporations had
some eternal proprietary claim over them.
All this put culture on the marketing agenda at about the same time as marketers
turned to Hofstede, who, as it happened, had quite a lot to say about Japan. From then
on marketers and Hofstede have been commingled. No one raised then the rather
obvious point that the Dutch guru was not viewing other cultures from a marketing

point of view. Marketers simply devoured Hofstede without realising that their
uncritical acceptance of his models and characterisations had an intellectually
numbing effect on the treatment of culture and international marketing.
Marketers, of course, cleave to Hofstede because his work remains the most
comprehensive study of cultural differences with putative relevance to marketers[1].
There is general agreement that his dimensions of collectivism and individualism have
stood the test of time, but there is less acceptance of uncertainty avoidance and the
classification of societies into masculine and feminine types. But, even if these
dimensions were valid for all time, do they actually help marketers? If Hofstede tells us
that Japan and Germany are both very masculine societies, does that mean that we
adopt a similar negotiating style with Japanese and German business partners,
especially as they both seemingly evince significant signs of uncertainty avoidance? If
not, how can a reading of Hofstede help us to craft our respective negotiating positions?
If we discover from Hofstede that Denmark is a very feminine society, does that
mean that we could create products specifically to complement the putative attitudes
and life-styles that go with it? If India is revealed to us as a collective society, does that
have an impact on consumer decisions, and how can we prove it? And if we can prove
it, what then? Is it seriously going to change the way we market to India? Probably not.
We are still going to depend on our Indian market intermediaries. They know how to
handle the people.
Then, after the collapse of communism in East and Central Europe, there was is
a rash of Hofstede-inspired dimensions that purport to reveal values of countries like
Russia, Ukraine, Bulgaria and Hungary. These of course are countries which were not
represented in the original study, so it is a kind of patriotism, a point of minor
chauvinistic honour, to be Hofsteded. If these studies tell us that Poland is slightly
more masculine than Russia (Lotric, 2003), do we modify our marketing approach
specifically to take account of that difference? Somehow I doubt it, though my reading
of history tells me there is a fearsome attitudinal gulf between the Russians and the
Poles (Davies, 1984) that makes that masculinity difference pale into insignificance.
History alerts me to the possibility that it might help me to secure a higher approval
rating with my business relationships in those countries respectively by making
anti-Polish remarks in Russia and anti-Russian ones in Poland.
So what I am suggesting is that Hofstedes great work is, as far as marketers are
concerned, of limited worth. That seems like an unthinkable thing to say. After all, time
and time again marketing scholars like to remind us that there are at least 200
definitions of culture in the management literature. Yet they invariably opt, perhaps
out of a species of professional safety, for the Hofstede one: the collective
programming of the mind which distinguishes the members of one human group from
another. But suppose that Hofstede is using a concept of culture that is not
appropriate to marketing.
A concept of culture that is out of date
In other areas of the management literature there are whispers of disaffection with the
prevailing concept (see: Osland and Bird, 2000; Holden, 2002; Schneider, 1988), but not,
it seems, in marketing writing. For example, Cavusgil and Das (1997) and Usunier
(1996, 1998) address the problems of methodology in cross-cultural marketing
research, but they do not suggest that there may be something restrictive with the

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fundamental concept of culture which informs research designs, methodologies and

analyses. The treatment of culture in standard international marketing texts indicates
that authors see no need to challenge the status quo, and inertia of this kind, as
Sullivan (1998) has noted, gives rise to a tendency to build consensus through iterative
replication or trivial refinement that precludes genuine shifts in intellectual direction.
To put these points in context, we must begin with the tradition that Hofstede
represents: a school of thought that regards culture as essence and difference. He is
thus linked to a tradition of anthropological studies that has its roots in the nineteenth
century. According to this essentialist understanding, culture is seen as a relatively
stable, homogeneous, internally consistent system of assumptions, values and norms
transmitted by socialisation to the next generation. Each culture therefore possesses
any number of highly distinctive features that have the effect of making that culture
uniquely different from all other cultures.
Marketing scholars have readily taken to this concept. It permits them to view culture
as a national aggregate of features, phenomena and constructs which influence markets,
their behaviour and notions of approaching them for marketing purposes. But the
dependence on Hofstede means that marketing scholars often build into their models and
taxonomies assumptions about cultural aspects of markets which originate from data on
work values not marketing factors obtaining nearly 40 years ago. It might in fact be
said that this Hofstede-derived approach to culture indeed suits a concept of international
marketing which is synonymous with exporting, whereby markets are in effect regarded
as culturally essentialistic entities, each (ideally) to be addressed in a distinctive way.
Under this guise culture is seen as a complex of non-tariff barriers with locally distinctive
manifestations as diverse as language, ethnocentrism, and buying behaviour. (I recently
reviewed a paper for IMR, in which that very position was adopted).
But just as globalisation has made the concept of exporting increasingly redundant,
so has globalisation made the essentialist concept of culture less and less satisfactory.
Here I must emphasise that I am not suggesting that we live in a globalised world in
which apparent uniformities reduce the impact of cultural differences as traditionally
perceived. The differences remain: the Japanese language remains a redoubtably
complex mirror of Japanese consumer behaviour; Germany is still a product- and
production-led business society (for reasons that are connected with that countrys
industrialisation in the latter half of the nineteenth century); the dizzying marketisation
of Chinese society does not suggest a waning of guanxi; rather guanxi is if anything an
accelerator of marketisation. The differences remain, but we have to learn to see them
in a new way. This is especially challenging to marketers for, as Usunier (1996) has
shown, the impact of cultural differences cuts across several areas of marketing. It is
worth producing his taxonomy in Table I.
The immediate challenge for marketers, as I see it, is to develop a concept of culture
which among other things does not construe cultural difference as a source of
subversion and antagonism, but recognises that culture does intersect with marketing
in the kind of way that Usunier (1996) suggests. The challenge, both conceptually and
pragmatically, is to create an understanding that is posited on the conviction that
culture and cultural differences represent resources, whereby barriers and gulfs for
they do exist become converted into inputs to underpin marketing strategy and its
implementation. This requires not only an intellectual refocusing, but also an
attitudinal change; and the latter may well be the harder to effect.

Area of marketing

Cultural differences influence . . .

Consumer behaviour
Market research
Overall marketing strategy
Targeting market segments
Defining regional market clusters
Product policy
Brand image
Price policy

Consumers values, attitudes and decision making

Equivalence and methods in cross-national market surveys
Global versus locally produced marketing strategies
Groups of countries or consumers sharing cultural traits
Organizing for marketing on a regional basis
Adaptation or standardization of product attributes
Brand and country-of-origin evaluations by consumers
Bargaining rituals/price quality evaluations/price
strategies towards consumers, competitors and suppliers
Channel style and service, producer-distributor relationships
World-views (through language) and communication styles
Selling styles, salesforce management, public relations, bribery
and ethical issues in an international context
Negotiation strategies, processes and outcomes
Attitude, organization, scheduling, role of emotions and
friendship, communication and interaction style, etc.

Distribution channels
Communication
Personal selling
Marketing negotiations
National style of marketing
Source: Usunier (1996)

Culture in standard international marketing writing is often degeneratively perceived

as involving a superordinate clash between my national culture and yours. Thus, if
something goes awry with our relationship, it is culture that gets the blame. This is
unproductive. The point to grasp is that each marketing relationship creates its own
culture. Seen in this way, culture is no longer to be associated with that vapid and
nave formulation the way we do things round here, but is rather to be apprehended
as an infinitely overlapping and perpetually redistributable habitat of shared
knowledge and meanings (Holden, 2002, slightly modified).
Common cognitive ground and culture as a resource in marketing
relationships
Such an approach to culture ought to have both pragmatic and intellectual appeal to
marketers, for marketing is a management function par excellence that in its daily
activities is always changing meanings in order to create common cognitive ground
(Nonaka and Takeuchi, 1995): in the case of marketing, with customers literally
possibly in their millions worldwide and diverse market intermediaries. From this it
follows that the important thing about culture for marketers is that it is something that
is either to be created or is waiting to be discovered. In this guise culture is no longer
fixed and solid. It is changing with the marketing relationships, but also changes them.
In terms of international marketing strategy development culture in this relational
perspective can even be imagined as a fully active, if only subliminally perceived
influence on the nature of standardisation and adaptation. That particular way of
considering adaptation and standardisation was not envisaged by Ryans et al. (2003)
nor, I assume, by the 100 authors they cite to support their view that this area of
international marketing thought lacks solid theory. You cannot have a theory of
standardisation and adaptation in international marketing that ignores cultural factors
as key variables. The important thing, however, is to be armed with an appropriate

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567

Table I.
The impact of cultural
differences on selected
aspects of marketing

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culture concept and to realise that the nature of the relationships the atmosphere
associated with them, their social value to interacting parties as well as economic
outputs cannot be divorced from any concept of product or service adaptation. It is
ethnocentric to pretend otherwise.
Seen in a relational way, culture then becomes a resource, a form of productive
knowledge about marketing relationships, about which there is always something new
to learn. As I have written elsewhere, culture is a dead resource until its value and
utility are recognized as knowledge (Holden, 2002; original emphasis). In other words,
culture is not just an inalienable feature of a market. It is also an element of our
perception of it and our participation through marketing activities in it. We may say
then that culture is knowledge about specific marketing relationships, but
problematically this knowledge is also globally scattered, yet awkwardly local
(Holden, 2002); and, of course, no two marketing relationships are exactly the same.
They never occupy the same common cognitive ground; they never share the same
meanings. When in fact we grasp that culture is a summation of knowledge about
marketing relationships, not only can we dispense with Hofstede: we have a concept of
culture that is in harmony with the global knowledge economy. Hofstedes concept
emphatically is not.
The approach to culture that I am advancing invalidates to some extent the
prevailing essentialist notion, but does not necessarily displace it. Rather it
complements it. Culture is no longer something one must cope with: it is a
knowledge resource in its own right which can serve as input to marketing research
and decisions and which can be also played out in market interactions. Accordingly,
this approach also brings marketers away from an export-oriented concept of culture to
one that fits the workings of the global knowledge economy, where marketing builds
networks which are not just pathways to resources, but clusters of affinity in their own
right, in which arrays of relationships form zones of interest around products and
services and the way in which they are presented to the market.
It is of course quite impossible to map Hofstedes dimensions on these clusters,
which have neither fixed geographical boundaries nor temporal permanence. They are
by their nature ever expanding, contracting and shifting their centre of gravity,
creating an effect that is hyperbolically termed turbulence. But in human terms these
clusters bring together arrays of languages, ethnic affiliations, organisational
competencies and market segments which at their various levels of their interactions
create a new culture, whose defining feature is its own cognitive common ground and
its unmappability on a physical, well delineated territory known as a market.
In short, we are talking of culture as a system for meanings which marketing helps
to create and maintain as a function of its relationship management activities. To say
the same thing in pragmatic terms: if you are planning a marketing strategy for China,
its implementation will become fused with Chinese society: the strategy, willy-nilly,
creates a culture with ones Chinese partners and intermediaries. That fact should
therefore be an element in the strategic marketing thinking.
This concept of culture is slippery, polymorphic and certainly cannot be compressed
into four (or five) dimensions. But it does try to take account of the nature of marketing
and markets in the global knowledge economy. But what are the benefits of this
approach to marketing practitioners? The immediate benefit is that it replaces, at least
in part, a view of culture that promotes cultural difference as a barrier and thereby
reinforces rather than reduces prejudice and ignorance. The replacement of the old

concept means that a foreign market is increasingly seen in its own terms but through
the prism of marketing relationships, the true essence of marketing knowledge. This is
why the relationship approach to marketing, first conceived by European scholars
more than 20 years ago, is still so important: it helps to make you see yourself more as
an increasingly informed insider within the foreign culture than an outsider fazed with
ambiguity.

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569
Three examples
Let me cite three examples to contrast the counter-productiveness of the traditional
concept of culture and the new one I am advocating here. As will be made clear, the
marketing-relevant cultural information contained in these three examples could never
have been deduced by application of the Hofstede model and its underlying
assumptions. The first case concerns Japan.
Some years ago I was involved in studying UK-Japanese buyer-seller relationships
(Holden and Burgess, 1994). One of our team interviewed a British marketing manager
who had been to Japan several times and had never changed his opinion of the
Japanese since his first visit. He thought that the Japanese and their customs were
ludicrous. It never occurred to him that the Japanese can smell a foreigner who thinks
they are stupid at 100 metres. Not surprisingly, he could not understand therefore why
the Japanese partners seemed to be so reluctant to visit the UK. The condescending
behaviour of the businessman became an element of culture in his relationships with
his Japanese counterparts; and it had negative consequences. Try to imagine, by the
way, the quality of his marketing reports, which provided his company with its main
picture of Japan.
The second case concerns the merger between Daimler and Chrysler. The huge
German car maker was only too aware that international mergers have a nasty habit of
failing or seriously underperforming. Determined not to make the same mistakes,
Daimler set up a team of specialists to study 100 industrial mergers. Nevertheless, the
so-called marriage made in heaven quickly got into problems: antagonisms between
top German and US managers, major lay-offs, which of course were not going to
happen; and even quibbles among the German and American managers about the size
of business cards. So how could it have all gone wrong?
First of all, these outcomes cannot be blamed on the team studying industrial
mergers. On the other hand, this team consisted I have this on good authority only
of Germans, who completely miscalculated the contrast in German and American
management styles. In other words, the study team never left the safe haven of their
own culture. The message for marketers is clear: impose your prior assumptions on
how things shall proceed in cross-cultural interactions and the chances are that things
will happen you were never prepared for (think of the situation in Iraq today).
The third example concerns my own experiences of management education in
Russia in the early 1990s. There, one of my tasks was to teach marketing to
construction managers. These novices in marketing were not interested in this topic
whatsoever, except when I touched on the international dimensions of the subject.
Then they grew attentive because they were desperate to do business abroad, abroad
being a dimly perceived West that would pour colossal sums of money into the
post-Soviet economy. Exactly what benefits, apart from prestige, Western companies
would actually secure was never made clear. The point I deduced was that I could not
be expected to teach marketing to Russians: how could I, a foreigner, possibly tell one

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Russian how to do business with another? When I made this insight, I simply taught
international marketing, suggesting to the managers that the international
techniques might be useful for business in Russia.
Behind this story is something that is not immediately obvious; nor will the key
learning point be self-evident. I was able to deduce this insight about this Russian
attitude to marketing because I speak Russian. Previous to my involvements in Russia
I had made a point of reading about Russian attitudes to, and knowledge of, marketing
in Russian. I was already aware that teaching marketing would not be straightforward,
but I was not at all prepared for the particular twist that those construction managers
produced. The point I wish to make here is that in this case, a knowledge of the local
language was valuable to me as an instrument of revelation about attitudes to
marketing in the pre- and post-collapse of the USSR.
Over the years the marketing literature has of course been at pains to emphasise the
importance of knowing a foreign language: but overwhelmingly for negotiating
purposes. There seems to have been little or no recognition in the marketing literature
of the value of foreign language knowledge as a mirror of local marketing thinking and
behaviour. Some readers may be sceptical on the utility of language competence from
this point of view. But the day is not far off when the marketing profession will have a
great need of it with reference to Arabic and Chinese. The writing is already on the
wall, if you think about it.
Culture: a new approach or trivial refinement?
If you make a culture (i.e. a foreign market) conform to the Hofstede dimensions, you
can guarantee that something important has not been captured. More to the point: in
several years of reviewing for International Marketing Review I do not recall one single
contribution that the infusion of Hofstede concepts has actually enhanced. In many
cases their incorporation has in my opinion actually detracted from the quality of some
submissions.
In a recent issue of International Marketing Review Warren Keegan (2004) observed:
. . .in marketing everything changes, and everything matters so the perfect plan of today can
become the reason for failure tomorrow if it is not renewed and relevant to current market
needs and competitive offers.

In line with this sentiment I challenge marketers to renew their concept of culture to
one that is relevant for todays global knowledge economy. It will, however, take some
time for marketers to evolve a new approach to suit their needs.
I have suggested the following foundations in this article:
.
abandon the dependence on Hofstede;
.
think of culture less in terms of markets perceived as national aggregates and
more in terms of clusters of affinity;
.
understand that culture is a not an external set of factors characterising a
market, rather that it is a facet of evolving relationships with that market;
.
recognise that culture is waiting to be discovered in these relationships; and
.
grasp that the discovery of this culture creates marketing knowledge.
The quest for a new theory or theories of culture that suit international marketing both
as an academic discipline and as a professional activity is long overdue. If marketers

are not prepared to change their stance on culture, they will surely deliver more
iterative replication or trivial refinement.
Note
1. Marketers may wish to note the global leadership and organizational behaviour
effectiveness project (GLOBE) is a multi-phase, multi-method project in which
investigators spanning the world are examining the inter-relationships between societal
culture, organizational culture, and organizational leadership. Approximately 170 social
scientists and management scholars from 61 cultures/countries representing all major
regions throughout the world are engaged in this long-term programmatic series of
cross-cultural leadership studies. See: www.ucalgary.ca/mg/GLOBE/Public
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