Global Product Strategies and Cultural Promotion in the Context of Culture-Commerce Interactions

As an integral part of commerce, marketing not only operates within cultural contexts, but also actively shapes them. This paper explores the strategic implications of the two-way interaction between culture and commerce on global firms’ product and cultural promotion strategies. We demonstrate that “cultural distance,” defined as the negative impact of a product’s foreignness on consumer utility, may act as a catalyst for consumer cultural adaptation, which improves the consumption experience and raises long-term profits for a forward-looking firm. Consequently, a global firm may keep a high cultural distance, even when reducing it is costless. Our analysis further reveals a strategic complementarity between cultural distance and cultural promotion. Although cultural promotional activities do not directly increase consumers’ willingness to pay for a foreign product, they can still enhance a firm’s profitability by facilitating cultural adaptation by fostering consumers’ appreciation of the foreign culture. As a result, cultural activities may benefit both the firm and consumers while promoting broader cultural adaptation, suggesting that not-for-profit cultural promotion may support organizations with a profit motive. Our findings have implications not only for global marketing strategies, but also for the role of these strategies in advancing cultural enrichment in the context of global consumerism.

History: Anthony Dukes served as the senior editor.

Supplemental Material: The online appendix is available at https://doi.org/10.1287/mksc.2024.0800.