Classical consumer marketing textbooks generally emphasize world markets and are often cross-border extensions of American marketing thought, blatantly ignoring people, languages and cultures and implicitly arguing in favour of uniformity. Whereas large multinational companies, such as Mars, Pepsi-Cola, L'Oréal or Nestlé, in fact do not follow the traditional textbook recipes: their practice is always much more adaptive to and respectful of local contexts. Further, the relatively recent financial shockwaves have left many of much of the developed world with very low or non-existent growth. This has prompted companies to seriously examine potential for growth into emerging and developing nations. However, these markets have very different consumers, including their interests, preferences, purchasing patterns and price sensitivities, very different competitive environments and very different marketing infrastructure.
This text offers a different approach to global marketing, based on the recognition of diversity in world markets and on local consumer knowledge and marketing practices. We invite the reader to undertake an exercise in de-centring. We try to break out of our 'Francocentric' and 'Aussie-centric' boxes, in much the same way as Gorn invites us to break out of 'North American boxes'. Understanding international diversitya in consumer behaviour and marketing management becomes the central teaching objective for an international marketing textbook.