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

eligion, social norms and values, education and the living style (Tian
studyoversees.com). According to Robert Guang Tian, Ph.D., Associate Professor of
Business Administration, not only does culture influence marketing; but marketing also
influences culture. Marketers act as agents of change within a culture
(studyoversees.com). Thus, ethnocentric marketers would tend to force a foreign
culture to adopt the marketer’s culture.
Business managers and marketers, inevitably view the world from the point of
view of their own environment. This is called the Self Reference Criteria (SRC)
(Lewis and Housden 14). James Lee in 1966 recognized this unconscious reference to
one's own cultural values, and he identified a four-stage approach to mitigate
decisional bias related to the SRC when dealing with international operations.
1) Define the problem in terms of one's own domestic culture.
2) Define the problem in terms of the foreign culture making no value judgments.
3) Isolate the SRC which affect the problem. How does it complicate the problem?
4) Redefine the problem without the SRC. (Lewis and Housden 15).
The SRC is practical, but Usunier, in his book Marketing Across Cultures, reminds us
that it comprises a degree of naivety and insufficiency (384). It presupposes that it is
possible to easily penetrate the mysteries of culture without being a native of that
culture in question. Sometimes neither marketing experts from the original country nor
foreigners are capable of diagnosis in the second and third phases of the SRC, and the
effects of bias removal are not immediate (Usunier 384).
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