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Home  >  All Issues  >  2022  >  No.05  >  Article Details
A Research on Global Consumer Culture: Progress, Review and Prospects
Huang Haiyang1, 3, He Jiaxun2, 3
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Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 44, Issue 05, pp. 98 - 113 (2022)  DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.20220323.301
First published at:May 20, 2022
Summary
References
Summary

Under the background of the combination of globalization and anti-globalization, many Chinese brands try to go to the global market with the purpose of achieving brand breakout. Compared with Western developed markets, the Chinese market has a highly active digital environment and a cultural environment that are different from the West, which provides a new perspective for global branding research. However, previous studies mainly adopt the etic approach to conduct global branding research, which is reflected in the construction of cross-border universal research frameworks or research conclusions. This paper provides a systematic review of global branding research from theoretical roots, related core constructs, and research themes regarding global consumer culture. Particularly, based on China’s economic and cultural contexts and the current research progress, this paper adopts the emic approach to identify main under-researched problems and propose new research points.

Firstly, based on previous studies, this paper reviews three theoretical foundations that underpin global consumer culture, namely, consumer culture theory, cultural globalization theory, and acculturation theory. The three theories outline the connotation, causes, and consumers’ differentiated attitudes of global consumer culture, respectively. However, these theories do not explicitly answer the cultural composition of global consumer culture. Therefore, on the basis of synthesizing three understandings regarding global consumer culture in academic circles, we redefine it as a collection of a series of cultural signs or cultural symbols originating from different countries that are jointly understood by specific consumer groups all over the world and can help them establish a sense of identity beyond local. Next, two related core constructs derived from global consumer culture are analyzed, namely, perceived brand globalness at the consumer cognitive level and global consumer culture positioning at the enterprise strategic level. The main problems of perceived brand globalness are reflected in conceptual confusion and inconsistent measurement. The main problems of global consumer culture positioning are reflected in the ignorance of the role of non-Western culture in the construction of this positioning.

Secondly, this paper identifies three research themes regarding global consumer culture. The first is “influence of perceived brand globalness”, which is dedicated to explore the mechanism of how perceived brand globalness creates value. The second is “how to build a global consumer culture positioning”, which mainly analyzes the effectiveness of different marketing mixes in building this positioning. The third is “consumer attitudes towards global consumer culture positioning”, which mainly investigates how consumers’ psychological tendency, personality / values, and demographic variables affect their behavioral intentions of global consumer culture positioning. On the basis of reviewing these research themes, this paper takes China’s economic and cultural contexts into consideration and proposes new research questions.

Finally, this paper provides three research guidelines for global consumer culture from research orientation, research methods, and research backgrounds. The main contributions are as follows: First, it adopts the emic approach to review and analyze global branding research. Second, it responds to Steenkamp (2020)’s call (the founder of global branding research), which proposes to conduct more research based on Chinese contexts. Specifically, it integrates Chinese contexts into this field and provides useful enlightenment for domestic scholars to carry out local-based global branding research.

Keywords
global consumer culture; Chinese contexts; perceived brand globalness; global consumer culture positioning; anti-globalization
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Cite this article
Huang Haiyang, He Jiaxun. A Research on Global Consumer Culture: Progress, Review and Prospects[J]. Foreign Economics & Management, 2022, 44(5): 98-113. 
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