Acculturaton to the global consumer culture: Scale development and research paradigm

The globalization of the marketplace and how this process is shaping the cultural characteristics of people around the world is arguably the most critical issue facing international marketing managers today. Powerful forces such as capitalism, global transport, communications, marketing and advertising, and transnational cosmopolitanism are interacting to dissolve the boundaries across national cultures and economies and in the eyes of some, accelerating the emergence of a homogeneous global consumer culture. The conventional method of using countries as the cultural unit of analysis or as a basis for market segmentation, is increasingly ill-advised, given that most of the world's countries are already multicultural and growing ever more so, and even within relatively homogeneous nations, individuals vary substantially in the extent to which they identify with, adhere to, and practice cultural norms. Many researchers argue that increasing globalization is reducing the homogeneity of consumer behaviors within countries, while increasing communalities across countries. Despite the importance of and widespread sociological discourse on this topic, (1) a scarcity of studies exists that have simultaneously considered both global and local cultural influences on consumer behavior, and (2) a scale for measuring how individuals acquire and become a part of this emerging global consumer culture is lacking. This article focuses on the development and validation of a multidimensional scale for the measurement of acculturation to global consumer culture, and is part of a larger international study examining the complex interaction and contextual nature of local and global cultural influences on consumer behavior. The article concludes with a proposed research paradigm intended to model such phenomena.