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

eflect an idea that can be applied to many organizations within most any type of
industry. The literature review has shown that ethnocentric thinking should be
eliminated in cross-cultural marketing. This testing of the hypothesis will attempt to
either confirm or deny that this is especially true where the Internet is concerned. It
will examine whether or not the Internet is a global marketing tool that further
contributes to the ethnocentrism problem, as it does not create the "global village” that
many perceive.
King, Keohane and Verba offer a way to merge the two realms of quantitative
and qualitative research. They suggest that if one holds a variable constant, and
changes the value of another variable, a causal effect can be found which answers the
original question or hypothesis (King, Keohane and Verba 10).
Research Protocol
This research is structured based on a protocol that administers the study in two
parts. Subjects were first given a survey consisting of 17 Likert-type scaled questions
to which they must answer with a response ranging from strongly disagree (a score of
1) to strongly agree (a score of 5). This portion of the study was completed while the
subject was not in the presence of the researcher. Secondly, the subjects participated in
qualitative interviews conducted by the researcher wherein the subject is asked to
exercise each of three websites and answer predetermined interview questions. To
prepare for the interviews, approximately one week before the interviews, the subjects
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