Culture

Cultural borrowing is when one country or culture borrows or copies elements of another country or culture. Examples of this are everywhere in music and art. A more specific example might be using a tribal or ancestral name for something modern-day like property or an athletic team.
The first step in bringing about planned change in society is to determine which cultural factors conflict with an innovation, thus creating resistance to its acceptance. The next step is an effort to change those factors from obstacles to acceptance in the stimulants for change. The same deliberate approach used by the social planner to gain acceptance for hybrid grains, better sanitation methods, improved farming techniques, or protein rich diets among the peoples of under developed societies can be adopted by marketers to achieve marketing goals.
Marketers have two options when introducing an innovation to a culture: They can wait, or they can cause change. The former requires hopeful waiting for eventual cultural changes that prove their innovations of value to the culture; the latter involves introducing an idea or product and deliberately setting about to overcome resistance and to cause change that accelerates the rate of acceptance. The folks at Fidelity Investments in Japan for example, pitched a tent in front of Tokyo’s Shinjuku train station and showered commuters with investment brochures and demonstrations of its Japanese language WebXpress online stock services to cause faster changes in Japanese investor behavior. However, as mentioned earlier, the changes have not happened fast enough for most foreign firms targeting this business.
Obviously not all marketing efforts require change in order to be accepted. In fact, much successful and highly competitive marketing accomplished by a strategy of cultural congruence. Essentially this involves marketing products similar to ones already on the market in a manner as congruent as possible with existing cultural norms, thereby...