Comparative Thick Description: Articulating Similarities and Differences in Local Beer Consumption Experience

Abstract

International marketing decisions are the result of complex trade-offs between global standardization and local adaptation. Similarities are too substantial and differences go too deep to be ignored. This chapter tries to articulate similarities and differences in local consumer experience across multiple contexts. It shows how language can be used as a discovery tool, along with depth interviews and checks of researchers’ interpretations by informants, to generate cognitive maps of consumption and taste experiences. Local words, used as emic signals, are com- bined into full profiles of the local experiences as narratives linking people to products and taste. Local profiles can then be merged to derive differences dealing with creolization patterns, local consumption experience, local preferences, per- ceptions and associations as well as commonalities emergent from within the contexts studied. The comparative thick description framework is applied to the beer consumption experience in ten countries (China, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Thailand, Tunisia, Turkey, El Salvador, Mexico) and 9 languages.