Carrefour

Impact of Culture on Consumer Behaviour and International marketing strategies

Submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirement of

International Marketing course

To

Prof Naval Bhargava

By

Ashima Verma

Isha Dhaila

Kumari Divya

Prerna Maheshwari

Priyanka Mohanty

Sujata Ajgaonkar

Students of Mudra Institute of Communications, Ahmedabad

(PGPCM - 2009)

ABSTRACT

The marketing concept, that revolves around providing value to the customer and giving her what she is missing and fill the “need-gap” in her life, has ‘understanding the consumer’ as one of the basic requirements. Consumer behaviour hence has become a study of great importance for good marketers. What could be the factors determining and affecting a change in this behaviour is the question that pops up and this is when the cultural aspect comes into picture as one of the major factors. Consumer changes with change in the market and when one talks of going international then there are even more factors that come into picture, culture being one of the strongly identified factors. This paper tries to understand implications of culture, its role in the decision-making, purchase patterns, and other determinants of consumer behaviour. The paper also tries to see the other perspective that is from the marketer’s point of view. If the change in culture across markets has any affect on marketing mix or not. Basically the authors intend to see the amount of impact culture in context of international markets has on consumer behaviour and have a look at some real life examples wherein the strategies across markets had to be altered in accordance with the cultural changes. In order to meet these objectives the paper after taking the above mentioned course then moves on to see the product categories whose marketing can affected majorly due to cultural diversity in international scenario. Three different brands: Levi’s, Pizza Hut and Barbie have been considered for the cases and the authors have...