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Multinational corporations need to recognize the importance of international management development. Formal human resource programs, tied to business objectives, need to be established. Ignoring the importance of global management development leads to missed market opportunities. Understanding and support at the executive level is a necessity. Human resource information systems need to include international data elements to help in the identification of candidates. Training budgets have to shift course work from a domestic focus to multicultural and international marketplace issues. The home and host managers must agree to the objectives for the employee prior to the assignment start. Repatriation assignments must align with the experience.

This paper investigates how members of ethnic minorities perceive ethnic-themed retail spectacles staged by mainstream marketers.

The data was collected in the North of France, through ethnographic methods combining in-depth interviews with French-Moroccan consumers, field observation of their shopping behavior in supermarkets, and online discussions on the subject.

The consumers’ responses reflect perceptions of dystopia, articulated in two interrelated types of discourses: inclusion versus exclusion on the one hand, and consumerism and the commodification of religion on the other. Spectacles aimed at being a cosmopolitan utopia into a spectacle become thus perceived as dystopic, alienating consumers who belong to ethnic minorities, some of whom will as a result oppose or boycott the supermarkets.

Given its phenomenological focus on consumers’ perception, this study provides an emic perspective on the phenomenon of ethnic retail spectacles. Further research should therefore study these contexts from multiple angles, in order to consider the role of other market actors such as retailers or the larger socio-political context.

This paper contributes to existing research by providing an understanding of ethnic minorities’ perceptions of product cross-over, understudied until now when it comes to mainstream marketplaces. Moreover, it highlights the importance of studying retail environments such as supermarkets, where ethnic spectacles enter consumers’ everyday life.

The purpose of this study is to understand how perceived vulnerability reduces consumers’ willingness to utilize services offered by nonprofit organizations (NPOs).

Three online surveys were conducted across two research contexts to test the proposed model. Hayes’ PROCESS was used to analyze the data.

Perceived vulnerability decreases the perception of relational benefits, which in turn decrease consumers’ commitment to NPOs. Reduced commitment lessens consumers’ willingness to cooperate and acquiesce to organizations’ recommendations. Risk aversion and cognitive ability mediate the relationship between perceived vulnerability and perceived relational benefits.

The findings uncover mechanisms through which perceived vulnerability influences perceived relational benefits, contributing to the understanding of behaviors of consumers that perceive vulnerable. This paper does not manipulate consumers’ perceived vulnerability but only measures their perceived vulnerability, limiting the explanatory power of causal relationships between perceived vulnerability and perceived relational benefits.

This study can provide some insight for NPOs about how to better serve their target population. To increase willingness to utilize service offerings, NPOs should decrease their perceived risks of new services.

This paper clarifies why consumers that perceive vulnerability are not willing to deploy the NPOs’ services which could improve their situation by demonstrating that cognitive ability and risk aversion mediate the relationship between perceived vulnerability and perceived relational benefits.

This study aims to develop and examine a model that links the foreigner service orientation, defined as indigenous consumers’ preference for service environments popular among foreign versus local consumers, to both foreigner and local comfort in intercultural service encounters.

The authors collected cross-sectional survey data from 516 indigenous consumers in Qatar.

According to the findings, although foreigner comfort is positively related to their service orientation, local comfort is negatively related to foreigner service orientation. The results further indicate that the relationships are intensified when cosmopolitanism or collective narcissism is high and when consumers are alone in the service setting.

Service firms can use the findings of this research to create a meaningful service environment based on consumers’ orientation to the in-group and out-group.

The examination of the foreigner service orientation addresses the possibility that consumers might prefer foreign consumers to local ones in service environments. This research also addresses the dearth of research on customer-to-customer intercultural service encounter.

The purpose of this study is to explore how service employee choice and use of language to initiate and maintain conversation with second generation immigrant customers (SGIC) influence customer evaluation of the service encounter, and whether such employee acts may lead customers to employee switching, branch switching (i.e. switching from one to another location within the same brand) and/or brand switching (switching to another brand altogether).

A scenario-based between-subjects experiment of 4 (employee: match, adapt, bilingual, no adapt) × 2 (fast food, post office) × 2 (English, Spanish) was used to examine the SGIC response to service encounters in different contexts arising from employee choice and use of language. These scenarios were complemented with a series of measurement scales. The instruments, which were identical except in scenario sections, were administered on 788 second-generation Mexican American customers, resulting in 271 (fast food) and 265 (post office) effective responses.

In both service contexts, when employees initiated conversation that matched (English or Spanish) the customer expectations, the SGIC perceptions of interaction quality was higher as compared to other scenarios, leading to subsequent satisfaction and lower switching intentions (employee and branch). Similarly, interaction quality was higher for adapt scenarios as compared to bilingual or no adapt scenarios. Bilingual customers perceived higher interaction quality in bilingual/no-adapt scenarios when compared to monolingual customers. In both contexts, service quality and satisfaction were associated with employee switching and branch switching, but not with brand switching.

By utilizing interaction adaptation theory to conceptualize the effects of employee choice and use of language, the study grounds the model and the hypotheses in theoretical bases and provides empirical corroboration of the theory. The study also contributes toward understanding the service encounters from the perspective of an overlooked group of vulnerable customers: second-generation immigrants.

Service research cautions service providers that a key factor in attracting and retaining customers is having detailed communication guidelines and empowering employees to follow those guidelines. The findings go a step further and underscore the critical role of communication from a managerial standpoint. It is in the interest of service organizations to develop guidelines that will govern employee choice and use of language during service encounters. So doing is commercially justified because unguided employee choice and use of language can result in customer switching and attrition.

The juxtaposition between assigned versus asserted identities is an important one not only in social sciences but also within service research. As service encounters grow increasingly multicultural, the need to educate employees on multiculturally appropriate communication etiquette rises in importance. The findings should encourage service firms and local governments to develop formal communication guidelines that begin with multiculturalism as a central tenet permeating all aspects of employee–employee, employee–customer and customer–customer communications. Service providers ought to take precautionary measures to ensure customers will be empowered to assert their identities in their own terms, if they wish so.

The study demonstrates how employee choice and use of language during service encounters may thwart SGIC, who might view such employee behaviors as acts of identity assignment and, consequently, feel stigmatized, marginalized and offended; and links such customer experiences to switching behavior through mediatory mechanisms.

Marketing students need better grounding in understanding major worldviews of the twenty-first century, given nearly guaranteed, international interactions with stakeholders. As such, the purpose of this paper is to develop a pedagogy focused upon secular and religious worldviews that can be used effectively in the classroom.

A cross-cultural study using data from the USA and China examines current worldview understanding among business school students. A training session in worldviews is then conducted, and a follow-up study is used to assess worldview learning and further interest in learning more about worldviews.

Student understanding of worldviews is increased through a 1.5-h teaching session. Students’ interest in learning more about worldviews significantly increased after the teaching session.

Worldview training is an effective way to prepare students for interacting with stakeholders in the increasingly global world in which these students will eventually work. Business schools need to incorporate worldview training in international marketing courses, at a minimum, or offer complete courses in worldviews and related applications to business operations.

Prior research has not tested worldview training on business students, especially when comparing student learning in a more religious-based culture (USA) and a more secular-based culture (China). Thus, this research shows that worldview training is effective regardless of the culture it is used in, which is important to informing students in a growing global marketplace.

The purpose of this paper is to examine how country of origin and consumer ethnocentrism pertain to first-generation immigrants, who often identify with two or more countries.

After a pretest to validate the modified consumer ethnocentrism scale, the main study used a series of scenario-based experiments and compiled data from 419 members of four distinct first-generation immigrant communities.

Non-ethnocentric immigrants favor the products of economically advanced countries. Ethnocentric immigrants favor the products of their home and host countries relative to foreign products, regardless of the economic standing of foreign countries. When home and host countries represent significantly different degrees of economic advancement, both ethnocentric and non-ethnocentric immigrants favor the products of the more advanced country.

Apart from the individual effects of country of origin and consumer ethnocentrism, the interplay between the two effects can yield important insights. There are other ways to operationalize multicultural identity beyond studying first-generation immigrants. Researchers should go beyond nationality and incorporate other forces of cultural diversity.

For both ethnocentric and non-ethnocentric immigrants, the product that benefits from both effects is the most preferred, and the product that benefits from neither of the two effects is the least preferred. Where the product benefits from one but not the other effect, the two effects hold roughly equal power for ethnocentric consumers, but COO dominates CE for non-ethnocentric consumers.

The paper presents a critical evaluation and extension of the respective literatures investigating familiar constructs in multicultural settings.

While demand for many products has become more homogeneous across countries, cultural factors have strongly inhibited this change as well. In a multicultural world, cultural heterogeneity will continue to remain the most significant barrier to one global market. Cultures are resilient and enduring and so is the concept of global multiculturalism. At the global level, trading blocs may be viewed as a cluster of geographically close countries that share abstract and/or material culture in varying degrees. It is interesting to note that the three major regional trading blocs (i.e. the European Union, North American Free Trade Agreement, and the Association of South East Asian Nations) can be characterized by significant differences in culture. With the rapid emergence of trading blocs in the multicultural market, our paper attempts to meet several objectives. First, we discuss the growing importance and underlying motives of regional trading blocs in a multicultural setting. The level of trading arrangements between nations is described and a brief overview of the three major trading blocs is then presented. The level of heterogeneity of each trading bloc is examined with implications for market segmentation. The critical role of strategic alliances in the context of regional trading blocs is discussed next. Finally, we recommend marketing strategies for firms marketing to countries within its trading bloc as well as to countries outside its trading bloc.

This chapter addresses the emerging trends in Australia’s food destinations and analyzes different demands for this experience from a Korean tourism market perspective. Tourism Australia’s report on the international market research was analyzed, and the findings indicate that four main food experiences were sought by Koreans. A sense of landscapes plays an important role in enhancing their local food experiences. Multicultural food, health conscious markets, and food shopping are also crucial for developing Australia’s competitive advantage in this area. This chapter suggests marketing implications and directions for future research to explore cross-cultural gaps in food culture and behaviors from the perspectives of Asian tourism markets.