Marketing and Global Cultural Identity

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Introduction As large corporations spread across borders and become increasingly globalized, they require the expertise of the global marketing and advertising industries to shape brand personalities into something relevant to consumers. The discipline of account planning, which is a blend of empirical and qualitative research, has been specifically created to get inside the mind of the consumer and help brand builders get their brand associated with something that speaks to those consumers. If that something doesn’t exist yet, it can be created. “The intended target of the ad is encouraged to identify with the message, people and style represented in the ad. Thus advertisements help to orient individuals in society by providing them with images with which they can self-identify.” 1 The pervasiveness of branding brings up the question of how does it shape global culture and identity? Through the exchange between brands and consumers, global corporations create their identities and influence cultural identities around the world, while at the same time being defined by them. Whether this is a positive or negative or both depends on an individual’s perspective of what globalization is doing to marketing. Globalization & Corporate Identity Globalization is used to describe the phenomenon of the world becoming increasingly interconnected in the past several decades. According to David Held’s A Globalizing World,2 it is marked by regionalization, stretched social relations, intensification of flows, increasing interpenetration, and global infrastructure. Put simply, developments in technology have allowed and facilitate new and accelerated economic social interaction leading to actions in one part of the world affecting those in other parts. Most of the globalizing influences are from the developed, particularly American, organizations outwards since they have the
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