Page 139 - GLOBAL STRATEGIC MARKETING

make mistakes either by being ignorant (stereotyping/self referencing
criteria) or by believing in the global village – or both. According to Kotabe

and Helsen (2001), cultural blinkers that occur at a subconscious level are
hard to detect. Consequently, cultural adaptation is very important so that
marketing decisions are made in line with the host country. Such

adaptation is hampered by the tendency to use self-referencing criteria
(SRC). SRC is a term coined by Lee (1991), a cultural anthropologist. It

refers to people’s unconscious tendency to resort to their own cultural
experience and value systems to interpret a given business situation
(Doole and Lowe, 2008). Lee outlined a four-step procedure that allows

global marketers to identify cross-cultural differences and take the
necessary actions to cope with them. Adapted from Kotabe and Helsen

(2001, p. 127), the four steps are:

1. Define the business problem or goal in terms of your own cultural
traits, customs or values.

2. Define the business problem or goal in terms of the host culture’s

traits, customs or values.

3. Isolate the SRC influence in the problem and examine it scrupulously
to see how it interferes with the business problem.

4. Redefine the business problem, but this time without the SRC
influence, and solve it for the optimal business goal situation.

The other issue that international companies should take into account
even more than SRC interference is ethnocentrism – the belief that one

culture is superior to another as this can have serious implications for
strategy development.