Cross-Cultural Analysis

Cross-Cultural Analysis
MKT 625 Consumer Behavior

Introduction
Understanding consumer buying behavior entails marketing, relationships, and consumer behavior. Consumer behavior comprises all the consumer decisions and activities connected with the choosing, buying, using and disposing of goods and services. Marketers must pay very close attention to consumer behavior that occurs before the purchase and after the particular product has been used. Studying consumer habits is one of the steps in marketing search and analysis. In addition to other basic principles of consumer buying habits, marketers also need to study the decision and actions of real people.   The trouble or the task that most marketers face is identifying how to sell their product to those people. There are many ways to sell a product, but identifying the buying behavior of the target market and catering to those behaviors is integral in today's complex society.
There are many reasons why there has been a dramatic change in the frequency, context and means in which people from different cultural backgrounds interact with each other. It is essential for an organization to understand the importance of diverse cultures for development and maintenance of business relationships and business networks within a cross-cultural business environment.   According to Schiffman (2007), “cross-cultural analysis is defined as the effort to determine what extent the consumers of two or more nations are similar or different”(p. 459).   Today’s businesses are hiring and operating in a highly diverse environment.  
Diverse cultural backgrounds between highly diverse staff base bring obstacles, challenges and difficulties to organizations. Cross cultural differences are visible in various areas such as in behavior, etiquettes, norms, values, attitude, communication etc. These general cross cultural differences affects high level areas too such as management styles, corporate culture, and marketing of an... [continues]

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