Characteristics of culture

Anthropologists commonly use the term culture to refer to a society or group in which many or all people live and think in the same ways. Likewise, any group of people who share a common culture—and in particular, common rules of behaviour and a basic form of social organization—constitutes a society. Thus, the terms culture and society are somewhat interchangeable[1].

However, the main characteristics of culture are:

1. Culture is prescriptive: It prescribes that kinds of behaviour considered acceptable in the society. Same of these characteristics create problems for those products not in acceptable within the consumer’s cultural beliefs.
2. Culture is socially shared: Culture cannot exist by itself as all the members of a society must share it.
3. Culture is learned: Culture is something that can not be inherited genetically but it must be learned and acquired.
4. Culture facilitates communication: Culture is one useful function to facilitate communication. However, culture may also impede communication across groups because of a lack of shared common culture values. This is one reason why a standardized advertisement may have difficulty communicating with consumers in foreign countries.
5. Culture is enduring: because culture is shared and passed along from generation to generation, it is relatively stable and somewhat permanent. Old habits are hard to break, and people and people tend to maintain its own heritage in spite of continuously changing world.

Culture is based on hundreds or even thousands of years of accumulated circumstances. Each generation adds something of its own of culture before passing the heritage on to the next generation. However, culture is constantly changing it adapts itself to new situations and new sources of knowledge.The work of Hofstede (1994) and Trompenaars and Hampden-Turner (1997), although criticised in terms of methodology and recency, does illustrate major cultural differences between emerging and developed markets[2]. Schutte and Ciarlante compared Hofstede’s and Trompenaars dimensions between Asian and Western markets and found that of Hofstede’s dimensions, Asian markets reflected higher power distance, and greater collectivism than in western markets[3]. They found with Trompenaars dimensions that Asian markets reflected more focus on relationships, on group rights, on the indirect expression of emotions and a view of status being due to position rather than to individual efforts. Subsequently Hofstede and Bond came up with an Asian cultural dimension of Confucian Dynamism[4]. These findings were supported by another study that compared the fourteen least developed with the fourteen most developed countries by Fletcher and Melewar[5].

[1]http://www.wowessays.com/dbase/ad3/ler19.shtml
[2] Richard Fletcher, The Impact of Culture and Relationships on International Marketing at the Bottom of the Pyramid, University of Western Sydney
[3] Schutte, H. and Ciarlante, D., 1998. Consumer Behaviour in Asia. Macmillan Business Press, London
[4] Hofstede, G. 2001. Culture’s Consequences, Comparing Values, behaviours, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations, 2nd edition, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, CA.
[5] Fletcher, R. and Melewar, T.C. 2001, The Complexities of Communicating with Customers in Emerging markets, Journal of Communications Management, 6 (1) 9-23.