Strome’s expert on cross-cultural Marketing speaks to researchers around the world
Marketing is no easy task. Professionals spend millions of dollars and endless hours finding the best way to target their audience, market their products and services, and gain customer loyalty. That task is difficult enough when you're trying to reach consumers in the United States. However, what about cultures you are not familiar with? What are their family values, standards of beauty, measurements of success, and other personality traits? Do they mean the same in different cultures, and how do we measure them? Fortunately, we have an expert in cross-cultural marketing here at Strome, Dr. John Ford.
Dr. John Ford has spent his career researching the importance of taking the time to consider the cultures in which companies expand their businesses to better understand the wants and needs, perceptions and choice possibilities for consumers from around the world. He is a thought leader in developing procedures for measurement of psychological traits across cultures, having published numerous articles, given key-note speeches, and seminars around the world in his career spanning over 35 years. He is a prolific researcher, and the Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of Advertising Research and serves as Associate Editor for Journal of Business Research, and serves on the board of many reputed Marketing journals.
Recently, Dr. Ford gave a seminar on cross-cultural scale development organized by a business school in India that was attended by 141 doctoral students and researchers from six different countries (United Kingdom, India, Ethiopia, Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Thailand). His presentation went through all the important steps and protocols that doctoral students and researchers in Marketing need to understand when measuring important triggers for consumer action like nostalgia or materialism. Reflecting on the focus of his presentation, he states "Many academics and practitioners are looking into developing ways of measuring these key personality traits in consumers, but often the work is overly rushed, and important quality control steps are left out. I wanted them to realize how important these protocol steps are in addressing the soundness of these measures."
Using his extensive research on cross-cultural measurement of personal nostalgia done with Dr. Altaf Merchant, a former doctoral student and now Dean of the Business School at University of Washington, Tacoma, he demonstrated how measurement of traits should be carried in a different culture. Companies use nostalgia to reminisce about warm and happy past memories, connecting them to the company and the brand, and put themselves in a nostalgic state. This is a powerful tool for marketers to build a strong emotional connection between consumers and the brand/company. People in different countries feel nostalgia in different ways, which must be reflected in how nostalgia is measured. For example, in their most recent published work, he, along with U.S. and Indian colleagues, found that there is an additional dimension "collective nostalgia" that consumers in India consider which those in the U.S. do not. Says Ford, "What many are doing by mistake is to use a measurement scale developed in the U.S. and take it into another country and simply back-translate it into the target foreign language, but this is never appropriate without first carefully examining what that trait really is conceptually in that other country setting and how it would manifest itself."
While his talk emphasized cross-cultural methodology, the implications of the work are relevant to other areas of marketing including negotiations, the influence of storytelling, celebrity endorsements, and portrayal of gender roles in advertising. This work has benefited both for-profit as well as not-for-profit companies over the years. John Ford continues to inspire doctoral students and his colleagues with his penchant for research rigor.
