Marketer Acculturation: The Changer and The Changed – Article Review
Essay Preview: Marketer Acculturation: The Changer and The Changed – Article Review
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Acculturation as defined in the article “Marketer Acculturation: The Changer and the Changed ” is a general term that encompasses intercultural interaction and adaptation and includes assimilation of a new culture, maintenance of the old culture, and resistance to both new and old cultures. Applying this concept in a marketers perspective, it seems that acculturation in marketing entails a very rigorous task. How can a marketer be a change agent but at the same time be changed in the process of acculturation?
With this, I was reminded of the TV series American Choppers which is televised at Discovery Turbo Channel. On the series, the OCC or Orange County Choppers Company with the leadership of Senior, the owner of the company, managed to reach-out into the culture of its target market by manufacturing personalized super bikes. The company honored their customers by anticipating their market desires and supplying them in ways of luxury and style associated with the good life concept. As the company produces different designs of super bikes, it becomes a change agent who passes its own ethnic and organizational culture onto its customers through market transactions. Alternatively, in the process of being a change agent, the company also acquired specific values in its personalized transactions such as family orientation and a looser sense of transaction timing and terms. Eventually, the company not only was a change agent in the process but had been changed as well. Simultaneously, the cultural learning takes place. The direct contact with the customers became the vital factor on the acculturation.
Similarly, the TV series Trick my Truck which is also televised at Discovery Turbo depicts how a consumers culture can dominate the marketplace. The Trick my Truck concept was born due to the existence of the American culture that emphasizes on personalizing ones property. With this, we can see that a marketer can never get away from culture as it needs to adapt from one cultural system to another.
In the same way, looking at the Philippine culture when it comes to cars, Filipinos tend to customize their cars by adding side skirts, changing mags and modifying its color. From this, we can infer how the different tire shops and car accessories shops evolved. Basically, the foreign manufacturer of the car parts for car customization has enculturated itself into the Filipinos culture but in the process was also affected by the Filipino culture itself in its marketing strategies.
Truly, as stated in the article, many marketers tend to adopt an attitude toward ethnicity and cultural identity in which they consider the market from the outside, without really realizing that their understanding of it and the actions they take toward it in fact contribute to further manifestations of cultural identity and ethnicity.
However, looking at the global perspective, the existence of intercultural