Icbs In Russia and the United States: A Promising Measurement for Consumer Behavior?

The question of whether global or national consumers exist has plagued researchers and practitioners for several decades. Levitt (1983) presented the argument for the global consumer in his seminal Harvard Business Review article. He proposed a new commercial reality where global markets for standardized products subsume dissimilarities in national or regional preference. On the opposite side of the continuum, scholars such as Wind (1986) and Samli (1995) believe that understanding national differences guides successful marketing and profitable corporations. Although both views are compelling, corporate victories almost certainly lie somewhere along the continuum rather than at the extremes. Thus, marketers need to understand both the similarities and differences among groups of consumers to ascertain which aspects of the marketing mix to globalize and which to localize. Consumer groups are formed, in part, by cultural similarities (Harasty 1996; Solomon 2002). Therefore, understanding cultures may provide essential knowledge by which marketers can achieve the global/ local mixture.