A Comparative Case Study of Global Marketing and Ethnocentrism ...

Clearly the United States has a long history of failed attempts at marketing to
other cultures (Herbig 2). Nevertheless, some disagree that the U.S. is a particularly
ethnocentric society. Lee and Sirgy theorize that Americans are likely to have
comparatively lower ethnocentric tendencies than some other cultures because the U.S.
is a pluralistic society (80). They suggest the United States has many different
interacting ethnic groups within it, thus the boundaries and distinctions may be more
blurred here than in Korea, for example. In addition, Steven Mailloux writes in his
essay, “Making “Comparisons”, the “we” in ethnocentrism must always be understood
as sociohistorically specific and politically contingent. Especially in the multicultural
that is the U.S., this “we” needs to be specified in each ethnocentric claim (112-113).
Still, the dominance of the U.S. has often led to the neglect of other nations in the
Western Hemisphere, each of which has its own complex multicultural and
multilingual history (Rowe 24).
Global Marketing and Ethnocentrism
Many books, journal articles and white papers have been written about the
concepts discussed above. Of special interest are the ones that target the conceptual
identification of different areas of corporate strategy formulation, particularly
marketing strategy formulation, which are assumed to be influenced by varying levels
of ethnocentrism. Sinkovics and Holzmuller suggest that individual sentiments toward
other cultures might influence a manager or management as a whole in terms of certain
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