Facts, Fantasies, Foundations, Formations, Fights, and Fallouts of Global Consumer Culture: An Introduction to the Special Issue

Abstract

Since the 1980s, innumerable books, papers and articles have been published debating the purported effects of globalization on society. Carving up the consumer landscape into global and local segments is further complicated by the fact that the individual consumer is increasingly fragmented: with an identity and exhibiting a consumption lifestyle that is thoroughly global in some situations, local in other circumstances, hybridized/creolized in certain settings and perhaps none of the above in still other conditions. [...]the globalization of markets provides international companies with a paradigm that promotes global brand portfolios over local ones. [...]companies are adapting their marketing strategies to target evolving global consumer segments that are favorably disposed to foreign and/or global market offerings (Papadopoulos and Martín Martín, 2011), as well as disguising or otherwise downplaying the brand or parent firm’s globality or foreign origin in order to attract and serve ethnic, national and parochial consumer segments. In particular, there is a dearth of research that seeks to better understand the distinctions among the numerous conceptualizations of consumer dispositions relating to cultural in- and out- groups (and in turn, how these combine to differentially drive brand preferences across product categories and consumption contexts), as well as their antecedents (e.g. how do personality dimensions shape the adaptation of dispositions); how multiple, potentially conflicting social identities interact and shape consumer behavior; the interaction among and commutation of global, foreign and local consumer cultures; the appropriation of global consumer culture (GCC) elements and their indigenization by local societies; and finally, the prospective advent of multiple, regional forms of GCC (e.g. to what extent do Western and Eastern variants of GCC detected by researchers overlap?).