In recent years, more and more well-known western multinational brands effort to adopt the host country’s cultural elements in the marketing and product design, such as Starbucks sells coffee and Chinese tea. Thus, two or more different cultural elements coexist in the same time and space, which has become a universal phenomenon in the adaptation of multinational brands’ localization, which is called " culture mixing”. Although culture mixing phenomenon has long existed, and has a certain importance for multinational brands and consumers in the host country, attention is not paid to the research on culture mixing phenomenon until recent ten years. The number is small and there is a lack of systematic sorting, making it difficult to provide comprehensive strategic guidance for the practice of multinational brands’ localization. Therefore, considering the importance of culture mixing in the practical and theoretical levels of transnational brands’ localization, this paper summarizes the research. First, this paper combs the manifestation and activation of culture mixing. The most famous one is from Peng(2013), who divided the culture mixing into three forms, that is material domains, symbolic domains and scared domains. After that, Peng and Zhao(2015) extracted nine types, that is consent, analogize, switch, juxtapose, integrate, graft, transform, adhere and creolize. Since then, scholars have actively explored the manifestations of culture mixing from different perspectives. What is more, Joint Culture Activation is the activation condition for culture mixing. Second, this paper discusses the host country’s consumer response to culture mixing and corresponding psychological mechanism from the aspects of the near-end and far-end results. The near-end results are rejection and fusion, and the far-end results involve brand purchase intention and brand boycott behaviors. In addition, this paper discusses the psychological mechanisms that caused this reaction, that is cognition mechanisms (eg. cognitive fluency), emotion mechanisms (eg. disgusting mood), and symbolism mechanisms (eg. perceived cultural invasion/perceived cultural pollution). Third, this paper discusses the boundary conditions of the host country’s consumer response to culture mixing. At the corporate and cultural levels, the boundary conditions mainly include the relationship between mixed cultures, comparative focus, framing strategies, mixing of advertising and brand origins. At the consumer level, the boundary conditions mainly include multicultural orientation, openness to experience, need for closure, cultural identity, cultural values, implicit prejudice, bicultural identity integration and other aspects. Finally, this paper evaluates the existing research and explores the future research direction to provide the corresponding reference for the local adaptation of multinational brands.
/ Journals / Foreign Economics & Management
Foreign Economics & Management
LiZengquan, Editor-in-Chief
ZhengChunrong, Vice Executive Editor-in-Chief
YinHuifang HeXiaogang LiuJianguo, Vice Editor-in-Chief
Culture Mixing in the Adaptation of Multinational Brands’ Localization: Review and Prospects
Foreign Economics & Management Vol. 40, Issue 07, pp. 113 - 128 (2018) DOI:10.16538/j.cnki.fem.2018.07.009
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Cite this article
Xiong Shasha, Wang Tao, Zhao Peng. Culture Mixing in the Adaptation of Multinational Brands’ Localization: Review and Prospects[J]. Foreign Economics & Management, 2018, 40(7): 113-128.
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