BULLETIN No. 3/2010 Series
Assessing the Impact of Strategic Global Entry from Cultural Research Perspective in Marketing: A Case of
Oil and Gas Industry in Romania
Oluwole Iyiola
Department of Business Studies, College of Business and Social Studies, Covenant University, Ota, Ogun State, Nigeria
e-mail: [email protected]
Abstract
Breaking into a new market is a classic path to business growth. Ability to understand consumption experience of consumers is a major concern of today’s marketers, most especially in view of the rise of experiential marketing approaches that seek to re-enchant people through consumption (Schmitt, 1999, 2003). Service businesses, in particular, are being urged to have a global view on what types of experiences to organize for consumers and how they should be provided. One of the entry strategy of a successful global organization is to research the market they are about to enter and most marketers are now turning to ethnographers.
Ethnography has therefore, devised a compilation of retrospective and introspective consumer narratives called “big stories” in contrast to “small stories” Therefore, ethnography of consumption has evolved towards a double method featuring, on one hand, observations that generate “small stories” and, on the other, introspection that generates “big stories”. Ethnography of consumption has been strengthened by the shift from a researcher-devised retrospective narrative in an interview form to an introspective narrative that is produced, fine-tuned and diffused by the consumer in the shape of a text diary, audio diary or video diary (Caru and Cova, 2008). This non-empirical article is to detail the major roles of ethnographers when a company wants to enter an international market. Romania is the largest oil producer in Central and Eastern Europe with reserves of 956 million barrels. According to the 2008 BP Statistical Energy Survey, Romania produced an average of 105.4 thousand barrels of crude oil per day in 2007, 0.12% of the world total and a change of 0.9 % compared to 2006. The country is a net oil importer, and according to the 2008 BP Statistical Energy Survey, Romania consumed an average of 229.29 thousand barrels a day of oil in 2007, 0.27% of the world total and a change from 2006 of 10.44 tbpd. This non-empirical article is to look into the entry strategies of oil multinationals wishing to do business in Romania.
Key words: Romania, ethnographers, entry strategies, consumer research, culture, anthropology
JEL Classification: M14, M31
Introduction
In today’s business world, managers are at all times under intense pressure to increase sales and profits of their firms. Thus, a search for new markets not only at home, but abroad is welcomed.
Globalization is the process whereby an organization increases its international: social, cultural,
political, economic, financial, and market integrations interdependence (Giddens, 1990; Eden and Lenway, 2001; Orozco, 2002; Molle, 2002). As globalization continues, more companies face decisions concerning which foreign markets to enter. In order to succeed in today’s global marketplace, managers must fully understand why, how, and where they intend to do business.
Therefore, a clear understanding of the proposed market is needed. Within the past two decades, globalization has caused drastic changes to business around the world. The current shift of businesses toward freer markets in Romania, Poland, China, Vietnam, Hungary, the Czech, the former Soviet Union, and Slovak Republics, and others (the so-called “transitional economies,”
or TEs) has led to great interest in the marketing challenges and issues unique to these markets.
While the major interest weighs heavily on multinational corporations (MNCs) - seeking the growth and leadership potential in these emerging markets, as the household penetration of durables and other goods in these countries grows rapidly from very low base levels (Nakata and Sivakumar, 1995). For instance, China reportedly now accounts for more refrigerator sales every year than the United States, and Czechs already buy more cars every year than the Swedes (Business Week, 1994). Another reason for this interest is the activity of businesses that wish to enter their own domestic markets and/or the international markets. The first step is to fully understand the environment. One of such aspects is the socio-cultural factor. To better understand this, managers must turn to anthropologists.
As obtained in the literature, Romania was a major oil producer and exporter throughout much of the twentieth century with the largest petroleum reserves in Eastern Europe. However, the oil extraction industry was developed primarily by German, United States, British, and Dutch companies. In addition, large quantities of crude oil had to be imported, and in 1979 imports surpassed domestic production for the first time. As of late 1970s, Romania became one of the ten countries producing offshore oil-drilling rigs. However, in 1988 seven of such platforms were operating in the Black Sea under the supervision of the Constanta-based Petromar Enterprise to develop hydrocarbon reserves in the continental shelf. During this period, Romania invested heavily in developing an outsized oil-refining industry (Anonymous, 1989).
Geographical Location
Romania is located in South-East Central Europe, north of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea. It lies between 43º 37' 07” and 48º 15' 06” latitude north and 20º 15' 44” and 29º 41' 24” longitude east. Romania, the largest country in southeastern Europe and the twelfth-largest in Europe, is located at the crossroads of Central and Southeastern Europe, north of the Balkan Peninsula, on the Lower Danube, within and outside the Carpathian arch, bordering on the Black Sea. Almost all of the Danube Delta is located within its territory and it shares a border with Hungary and Serbia to the west, Ukraine and the Republic of Moldova to the northeast, and Bulgaria to the south (NATO, 2004). With a GDP of around $271 billion and a GDP per capita (PPP) of $12,600for the year 2008, Romania is an upper-middle income country economy and has been part of the European Union since January 1, 2007.
Romania is a country of considerable potential: rich agricultural lands; diverse energy sources (coal, oil, natural gas, hydro, and nuclear); a substantial industrial base encompassing almost the full range of manufacturing activities; an educated work force; and opportunities for expanded development in tourism on the Black Sea and in the Carpathian mountains. Due to her locational advantage of providing easy access to the former CIS and the Balkans as well as it being the second largest market in Central and Eastern Europe, has made it an ideal gateway for Indian companies that wish to develop business in that region. Senior officers in the Romanian embassy in New Delhi told FE, “Although between Romania and India there is a huge geographical distance, nevertheless the diplomatic relations and the economic cooperation are
the best and these are strategic. For instance, the oil and gas sector and the defense industry are strategic priorities of the bilateral economic relations” (Siddiqui, 2009).
According to Dimancescu (n.d.), Romania is once again at the heart of competing 'imperial' pressures. As world's powers: Russia, Europe, United States, and China pit against one another in the world oil market, by virtue of its strategic location along the Black Sea, Romania has become a major conduit point for Caucasus and Caspian Sea oil seeking routes to markets other than through Russia. The United States, in particular, have worked aggressively to establish alternate conduits for oil and gas around Russia. Afghanistan was viewed as one potential southerly transit country. Another is the Georgian route bringing Caucasus oil into to Black Sea harbors and into Turkey and Europe. The Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan (BTC) Pipeline, opened in May 2006, is the first fruit of that strategy with a 10 million barrel capacity. According to the report of Bucharest Daily News (2005), Romania will be the starting point of a 1360 km (800 mile) pipeline reaching the Adriatic. Countries to be crossed by the Constanta-Trieste pipeline have signed in Belgrade the treaty on approving the project. Representatives of Romania, Serbia, Croatia, Slovenia, and Italy met in Zagreb for talks on the project’s financial resources to address the costs, depending on the construction alternative, which would range from EUR 2.6 billion in the cheapest scenario to EUR 9 billion.
EU oil pipeline network EU gas pipeline network
Forest Oil’s exploratory rig in Romania Map of Romania
This pipeline project puts Romania squarely into the 'big-stakes' oil game. It not only makes Constanta port an entry point but it leaves the option open for a cross-Black Sea pipeline. The Constanta-Trieste line will create oil flows reaching 50-60 million tons per year, equal to the amount currently shipped through the Bosporus Straights. Capacity of the same line is estimated at 112 million tons annually. Such flows imply significant transit incomes in the hundreds of
millions in Euros but also abundant raw material to Romanian refineries. This will boost the growth potential of local refining companies such as Austrian controlled OMV/Petrom and RomPetrol. As far as the pipeline is concerned major foreign companies have reputedly shown interest: General Electric Energy Oil & Gas, China National Oil Corporation. Austrian (OMV) (Petrom's major shareholder), Chevron, Texaco, and British Petroleum (Dimancescu, n.d.).
A country of about 21.7 million, Romania has a culture that is very rich in tradition and folklore.
Festivals feature brightly ornamented costumes with traditional dancing. Wood carvings, skillfully woven carpets, and pottery are some of the elements of traditional Romanian culture.
Unlike its Slovak neighbors the Romanian language is Latin based, adopted when the Roman Empire occupied the area. It is one of the Romance languages, similar to French, Spanish, and Italian. Hungarian and German can also be found spoken as the native tongue in some towns and villages. An element left behind when parts of the country were ruled by other nations.
Many Romanians also speak English or French very well in the bigger towns and cities.
Anthropologists are commonly thought of, as experts in the study of our culture. One of the fields of study in anthropology is ethnography, which studies and describes individual human cultures and social behaviors. In anthropology, these lessons are embodied in two related discourses. One, ethnography, is descriptive of specific cultures, while the other, ethnology, involves comparison of cultures and theorizing about culture in general. While ethnography is much better known, its practice is inevitably laced with ethnology, for most descriptions use terms that cross cultural frames. Good ethnography thus inevitably involves significant, reflective meta-discourse as opposed to only implicit theorizing (Hakken, 1999, p. 3).
Marketing is now among the pre-eminent institutions of cultural stability and change at work on the planet. Businesses have been engaging the services of the social sciences, including ethnography, since 1930. Today, the beauty of ethnography is that it provides a richer understanding of consumers than traditional research does (Ante, 2006). Currently, ethnography is assuming a growing importance in the marketer’s effort to influence the accommodation and resistance of consumers to the neocolonial forces of globalization (Sherry, 2007). The roles of the ethnographer in the global market-oriented are explored in this essay. According to Sherry (1995), marketing has become perhaps the greatest force of cultural stability and change at work in the contemporary world. Therefore, in order for an organization that intends to go global, a full understanding of the consumer culture in the new business environment and the market planned to enter as a matter of fact is as a phenomenon that asserts that market-oriented ethnography can refine both our grasp and command of moral geography.
Ethnographers’ main job is to talk to and observe people, within their society as they go about their daily routines, adopting sociology and anthropology methods for data collection and analysis - giving clients true-to-life, informed insights and a firsthand understanding of their customers. Ethnographers employ social scientific and humanistic methods to produce idiographic and nomothetic accounts. They engaged in the use socio-cultural, linguistic, biological and archaeological orientations in their quest for understanding and track phenomena across time and space.
Literature Review
Contractor, Kundu, and Hsu (2003), concluded that foreign market entry required choices of considerable interest in international marketing research. Marketing, according to Sherry Jr.
(2008), “is now among the pre-eminent institutions of cultural stability and change at work on the planet.” Presently, the influence of culture in the field of marketing – particularly, consumer behavior cannot be overemphasized. As a result, ethnography has assumed a growing importance in the marketer’s effort to influence the accommodation and resistance of consumers to the neocolonial forces of globalization. Ethnography, according to Sherry Jr., (2008), “is the
deep understanding of the lived experience of people as it unfolds in a particular cultural context, and the representation of that understanding in ways that are faithful to that experience.” A thorough understanding of how consumers behave in the market place has been attributed to the culture of the consumers; besides the fact that marketing involves an outlay of resources, it is more receptive to cultural differences. Omar, Kirby, and Blankson (2003), indicated that there is consensus that culture has a fundamental influence on marketing practices and that cultural differences affect marketers’ behavior in ways parallel to their effects on consumers.
Culture is made up of many different components, such as language, religion, values and standards (Hill, 2002). According to Taylor (1891), culture is ‘that complex whole which includes knowledge, beliefs, arts, morals and law, customs and any other capabilities and habits acquired by man as a member of that society’. Hill (2002) concluded that the culture of human beings influences their decisions and behavior. These parameters influence the way in which individuals perceive different things, resulting in one of the main functions of a culture, namely the structure in which people perceive and evaluate different things (Hall, 1989).
In marketing, there is ample evidence to suggest that, culture influences relational and interpersonal interactions in the global market place (Yang, 2005), and the nature of buyer-seller interactions has changed from adversarial to relationship building (Kalafatis, 2000). Cultural differences reflect on values, which also affect the way people think in society, and behavior, which affect the way people act in a society; thus, it is imperative that marketing and sales managers understand the impact of cultural differences.
It is very important that one should note that consumer behavior is a result of interplay between inner self and outer stimuli – (which are guided by the way we see ourselves and the values that goes with it). These values are products of our society norms and culture. According to Banerjee (2008), consumption is a social and cultural process involving cultural signs and symbols, not simply as an economic, utilitarian process, and national culture has considerable influence on consumer behavior (Jaishankar, 1998).
The culture of a country can provide a strong support as well as a powerful obstacle to the success of an organization, in a global arena; therefore, the ability to manage a country’s specific culture becomes an increasingly strategic issue. Since culture is an outer stimulus, it has influence on the diffusion of products across countries; therefore, to ensure the success in global market, interpreting host country-culture and addressing it in a right manner are important issues (Kumar, Jaishankar, and Echambadi, 1998).
Globalization
Globalization is what happens when the movement of people, goods, services or ideas among countries and regions accelerates. As a result of the emergence of global market opportunities and threats, firms have been forced to respond quickly, unlike other environmental changes, the effects of globalization are far more pervasive-affecting every individual, business, industry, and country (Garrette, 2000). Nevertheless, the term globalization has become a household terminology in the business world. Businesses are moving from one location and establishing other location in the other parts of the world. According to D'Aveni (1994), the business environment today is surrounded and characterized as a “hypercompetitive” environment-a faster and more aggressive competitive environment.
The necessity to conform to customer requirements and in addition to the financial drive to reduce costs through standardization was nowhere more evident than in relation to the globalization program many consumer-marketing firms started self-consciously to undertake during this time. “Going global” meant encountering a greater maximum of variations in
consumer preferences, since cultural and other “environmental” diversities grow in proportion with the enlargement of the marketing catchment area. At the same time, successful expansion depends upon the power to standardize one's product and marketing (Applbaum, 2004, p. 82).
There is broad agreement in the interdisciplinary heterodox literature that markets do not simply fall out of thin air, but are continually produced and constructed socially with the help of actors who are interlinked in dense and extensive webs of social relations. This common ground notwithstanding, there are differences in opinion as to precisely how markets are realized. The following areas are considered:
1. Socioeconomics questions the orthodox free-market by pointing out that concrete markets cannot be separated from their social and institutional context. Dissolving the market in social networks, scholars writing in this tradition socialize markets.
2. Political economy looks at how powerful players see to it that the abstract market model is confused for real markets by market participants. Work in this tradition stresses the damage inflicted on ‘the social’, the market being portrayed as a destructive force. Both sets of heterodox literature are well known and have had considerable presence in economic geography recently. (3) Cultural economy is the third approach. However, this area is still comparatively neglected and widely misrepresented, above all with regard to the work on seemingly hard economic phenomena such as the market. Cultural economists dissolve the opposition between market and non-market in a different way, pointing to the practical self- realization of economic knowledge.
Ethnography: The Ethnographic Method
According to Lareau and Shultz (1996, p. 3), “the field of anthropology, ethnographic studies had a host of characteristics including the use of participant-observation to study a community for an extended period of time, a holistic approach, the portrayal of the community from the perspective of the participants, a focus on culture (particularly the lived culture of the setting), and a focus on context.” According to Jonhston (2005), “ethnography has a logical appeal for business clients: market intelligence born from the homes and hearts of customers. It’s an ethnographer’s job to talk to and observe people, as they go about their daily routines, using sociology and anthropology methods for data collection and analysis—giving clients true-to- life, informed insights and a firsthand understanding of their customers”. However, the socioeconomic work on markets casts a strong shadow over economic geography. Since the early 1990s economic geographers took up conceptual developments in economic sociology, applying embeddedness and networks as key concepts to better understand differences in the performance of firms and regions in an increasingly globalized economy (for early examples, see Dicken and Thrift, 1992; Storper, 1992; Grabher, 1993; Amin and Thrift, 1994).
Qualitative research methods are employed by social scientists, to collect data. Ethnography has developed perhaps the greatest legitimacy based on the work of Denzin and Lincoln (2005).
Based on the rigorous demands made on the researcher by the ethnographic process and the interesting and influential stories that have been woven over the last century by ethnographers, it has not only become “the trademark of cultural anthropology” (Schwartzman, 1995, p. 1), but it has also informed a variety of social sciences, including organizational studies. Kunda’s (1992) study of high-tech firms and Barley’s (1996) analysis of the work of technicians and technology stand out among several ethnographic studies in management. Based on Prasad (2005, pp. 78-83) elaboration, the great advantage of ethnographic research comes from three sources, namely the power to provide a thick description of events (Geertz, 2000), the ability to illuminate a setting in its cultural and historical context (Bate, 1997); and the narrative dimension that allows us to string different events into coherent thematics (Rosen, 1991).
Any characterization of the marketing environments of TEs must be preceded with two caveats.
The first is simply that these economies are changing so rapidly that any description of what their markets look like is very likely to be out-of-date by the time it appears in print. The second, as just discussed above, is that there is obviously great variance across the many markets that are here collectively being called TEs. It goes without saying that some of the markets are more “advanced” than others in terms of consumer incomes, average education levels, transportation and logistics infrastructure, the availability of high-quality marketing data and human resources, and many other very important market dimensions (Rajeev, 1997).
Ethnography is the deep understanding of the lived experience of people as it unfolds in a particular cultural context, and the representation of that understanding in ways that are faithful to that experience. An effective ethnographic account of behavior is not only cognitively enlightening, but also viscerally evocative. Sherry and Kozinets (2001) indicated that the typical ethnographic toolkit is made up of the following methods and techniques: archival analysis, interview, participant observation, photography, trace analysis videography, and projective tasking.
Marketing
The ability to understand consumption experience of consumers is a major concern of today’s marketers, most especially in view of the rise of experiential marketing approaches that seek to re-enchant people through consumption (Schmitt, 1999, 2003). In 2005, the American Marketing Association Board proposed a current definition of marketing as: ‘‘Marketing is an organizational function and a set of processes for creating, communicating, and delivering value to customers and for managing customer relationships in ways that benefit the organization and its stakeholders.’’ This to some is a profoundly disappointing definition, anthropologically speaking, as my entire preceding discussion would suggest. Marketing is understood clinically to include the strategy and tactics involved in creating and sustaining the variables that have traditionally comprised its mix: product, promotion, price and place. Periodically, the number of variables has been adjusted upward (to include, for example, politics and public relations, etc.), but the core four remain foundational. Marketing’s theatres of operation have usefully been described by three dichotomies (Hunt, 1977): positive, profit and micro, versus normative, nonprofit and macro. The former cluster has been most scrutinized and pursued, the latter relatively neglected. Anthropologically, marketing is more comprehensively understood as an exercise in behavioral engineering, insofar as it involves the shaping of the experience of others (Levy, 1978).
Ethnography and Marketing – “Ethnomarketing”
Desjeux in 1987, coined out a word to designate the ‘marriage’ between ethnography and marketing – ethnomarketing (Desjeux, 1990). “Ethnomarketing” is therefore, a way to describe how ethnology applied to the study of consumers’ and/or shoppers’ behavior. Not only that ethnomarketing might help to enhance how marketers better understand consumers’ and shoppers’ behavior; it also offers a more actionable and management-oriented perspective, thus the purpose of ethnomarketing is to identify – based on ethnographic observation and anthropological analysis – propositions that target actors in the commercial world and which can translate into a real marketing apparatus (positioning, targeting, marketing strategy, marketing mix, etc.).
“Ethnomarketing’s contribution is supposed to be that it improves performance in commercial terms (number of customers, revenues, returns rate), but also in marketing (satisfaction, reputation, image) and financial terms (profitability, higher brand value). Ethnomarketing is
therefore clearly differentiated from its mother disciplines, which are anthropology, ethnology and ethnography
Within this framework, the present article, which is theoretical in nature, starts (1) by suggesting an analysis of how technology (relating mainly to consumption and shopping) has contributed to modern research on consumer behavior and retailing? This is followed (2) by a specification of the operative modalities driving research in ethnomarketing, notably the different phases involved in such an approach. A third section (3) indicates the managerial enhancements derived from ethnomarketing. The conclusion raises questions relating to the limitations of this approach and offers possible future paths for ethnomarketing” (Badot, Carrier, Cova, Dejesus, Filser, 2009) (See Frame 1).
Frame 1.
The disciplines that gave birth to ethnomarketing.
Anthropology is the science of human beings, their origins, history, social behaviors and activities.
Encompassing pre-history, ethnology and sociology, its analysis is situated in a theoretical and comparative perspective. Physical anthropology focuses on humans’ biological aspects; economic anthropology looks at modes of production in the material world; and social anthropology looks at social and family organization, politics and religion.
Ethnology is the discipline that, by synthesizing and analyzing “field data”, focuses on the study of cultures (variables and invariables) based on qualitative investigations of small social units. After first studying remote societies, Western ethnologists began looking at their own communities in the 1970s, first in rural settings and ultimately in cities. Anglo-American researchers call ethnology
“cultural anthropology”. Whereas anthropology and ethnology are disciplines, ethnography is an investigative method whose priority is to mobilize informal interviews with selected informants and/or conduct on-site observations that tend to be participant in nature and written up in notebooks called “field logs” or “field diaries”.
Ethnographers can also use more formal types of interviews (semi-directive or open) and even questionnaire based surveys to verify any trends they identify via a more qualitative approach.
Analysis here involves iteration between the data that have been collected and a progressive interpretation of indices, all of which ultimately produce a general explanatory thread.
Source: adapted from Monjaret and Provost, 2003.
This first section traces social sciences’ contribution to the study of consumption and shopping and presents the main sources and characteristics of the ethnology of consumption, shopping and retail outlets. Finally, it offers a table summarizing seminal as well as more recent studies focused on the main themes found in Consumer Culture Theory (CCT).
Consumption analysis can be conducted at different levels using different scales of observation that do not produce the same results (Desjeux, 1998). Economists and psychologists, for example, have mainly stressed analyses of motivations and purchasing decisions based on an explanatory model of consumer rationality in which consumption is viewed as an individual act.
Social sciences like history, but above all anthropology, sociology and ethnology have proposed other approaches, based either on other scales of observation (macro and micro-social) or a different breakdown of reality (Badot et al., 2009).
According to Arnould, Price, and Zinkhan (2002), over a period of time consumption experience can be divided into four main stages:
1. the pre-consumption experience, which involves the search, planning, day-dreaming about and foreseeing or imagining the experience;
2. the purchasing experience, which involves choosing the item, payment an packaging, as well as the encounter with the service and the environment;
3. the core consumption experience, which involves sensation, satiety, satisfaction/
dissatisfaction, irritation/flow and transformation; and
4. the remembered consumption experience and the nostalgia experience, with photos being used to re-live past experiences through narratives or arguments with friends about the past, all of which tends to culminate in a classification of memories.”
There is no doubt that marketers are very interested in different kinds of consumption experiences; each experience has several dimensions such as: physical (movements); cognitive;
sensorial; communicative (or relational); and emotional. Market research is expected to provide the criteria that enable the construction of the experiential side of the company offering. Thus, the company needs to be familiar with the consumer’s feelings and inside states during the experience; with whatever it is that facilitates his/her access to moment of well-being or enjoyment; and with anything that might obstruct such access.
Ethnography has been and will continue to be used to cover such experiences, nevertheless this can only be achieved through a combination of observation and verbatim because internal states of consumers, such as perceptions, values, beliefs of informants and observational data taken alone can only reveal little about the informants’ state of mind and do not provide direct access to such information. Only speech-in action, unstructured interviews, or questioning during participant observation provides such information. Ethnographers may privilege observational data in building interpretations but can be expected to combine them with verbal report data to account for the phenomenon of interest more thoroughly” (Arnould and Wallendorf, 1994, p.
488).
Marketing and Culture
Culture is an integrated pattern of human knowledge, belief, and behavior that is both a result of an integral to the human capacity for learning and transmitting knowledge to succeeding generations. Culture thus consists of language, ideas, beliefs, customs, taboos, codes, institutions, tools, techniques, and works of art, rituals, ceremonies, and symbols. An individual's attitudes, values, ideals, and beliefs are greatly influenced by the culture (or cultures) in which he or she lives. Culture can provide a strong support or it might be a powerful obstacle for organizational success. Culture change takes place as a result of ecological, socioeconomic, political, religious, or other fundamental factors affecting a society. In marketing, culture has been linked to subject areas such as consumer behavior. Cultural factors have the broadest influence, because they constitute a stable set of values, perceptions, preferences, and behaviors that have been learned by the consumer throughout life. For example, in Western cultures consumption is often driven by a consumer’s need to express individuality, while in Eastern cultures consumers are more interested in conforming to group norms.
Cultural research has received a great deal of attention in marketing. Anthropologists usually make use of consensus analysis methods to study cultural knowledge. According to Handwerker and Borgatti (1998, p. 569), “consensus analysis has been used to study intra-cultural variance, intercultural variance, and cultural consonance across a variety of contexts”. Nevertheless, cultural consensus model and other consensus analysis methods have not been adopted by marketing researchers, and therefore have not become methods that are commonly used to study cultural knowledge in the field. However, consensus analysis answers what may be the single most important question of ethnography: Who agrees with whom about what and to what degree (Handwerker and Borgatti, 1998).
Over the course of many years, anthropologists have developed and adopted various consensus analysis methods to study cultural knowledge (D’Andrade 1995; Borgatti 1994; Romney, Weller, and Batchelder 1986; Ross 2004; Weller and Romney 1988; Handwerker 2002; Weller 1987, 1998). Consensus analysis methods have in many ways helped anthropologists answer fundamental ethnographic questions in a systematic and objective manner. For example,
ethnographers are faced with questions like: what are the beliefs that a cultural group shares?
Furthermore, what are the backgrounds, life experiences, or other variables that lead people to share a group’s cultural beliefs? To what extent do the individuals in a cultural group share the group’s cultural beliefs? The consensus analysis methods used by anthropologists to answer these questions offer marketing researchers new tools that can be used to study cultural knowledge in a systematic and objective manner (Romney 1999; Weller and Romney 1988). If marketing researchers find these new tools as helpful as anthropologists have (as alluded to in the opening quote), then cultural research will offer a valuable contribution to the marketing literature.
Conclusion
There has been a power shift from producers to customers. Consumers are in control because they have unprecedented choice; they have developed ways of shopping, managing family life, working, traveling, keeping healthy, and other modes of living that are almost impossible to predict. In the age of mass production and mass markets, consumers’ choices could be predicted in part because they had so few. In getting adequate information about consumers, now we possess deep knowledge of how to make things and an inadequate understanding of how people are living their lives. Apart from this, sophisticated companies know they need to understand how consumers decide to purchase a product and how they feel about using that product.
As companies extend their global reach with the advent of the Internet, and marketers attempt to develop and maintain long-term relationships with customers, there is an increasing need for marketing research that spans over numerous cultures (McGorry, 2000). According to Saxton (1998), marketing research today must investigate in more detail methods for addressing cross- cultural research. Marketers must become more attuned to social and cultural backgrounds in order to better address global consumers' needs and ethnographers will help them achieve this goal. Romania, because of its strategic location in Europe should prepare itself for more international business opportunities in the oil and gas industry.
References
1. A m i n , A., T h r i f t , N. (1994). Living in the global. In Amin, A. and Thrift, N., editors, Globalization, institutions, and regional development in Europe, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1–22.
2. A n o n y m o u s (1989). Romania - oil and gas. Retrieved from: http://www.country-data.com/cgi- bin/query/r-11212.html, on June 23, 2010.
3. A n t e , S. E. (2006). The Science of Desire. Business Week, June 5, p. 99-100.
4. A p p l b a u m , K. (2004). The Marketing Era: From Professional Practice to Global Provisioning Routledge, New York, NY.
5. A r n o u l d , E. J., P r i c e , L., Z i n k h a n , G. (2002). Consumers. McGraw-Hill, New York, NY.
6. A r n o u l d , E. J., W a l l e n d o r f , M. (1994), Market-oriented ethnography: interpretation building and marketing strategy formulation, Journal of Marketing Research, Vol. 31 No. 4,pp. 484-504.
7. B a d o t , O., C a r r i e r , C., C o v a , B., D e s j e u x , D., F i l s e r , M. (2009). The contribution of ethnology to research in consumer and shopper behavior: Toward ethnomarketing. Recherche et Applications en Marketing, Vol. 24, 1/2009.
8. B a n e r j e e , S. (2008). Strategic Brand-Culture Fit: A conceptual framework for brand management, Journal of Brand Management 15, 312 – 321.
9. B a r l e y , S. R. (1996). Technicians in the workplace: ethnographic evidence for bringing work into organization studies, Administrative Science Quarterly, Vol. 41, pp. 404-41.
10. B a t e , S. (1997). Whatever happened to organizational anthropology?, Human Relations, Vol. 50, pp. 1147-75.
11. B o r g a t t i , S. P. (1994), “Cultural Domain Analysis,” Journal of Quantitative Anthropology, 4, 261-78.
12. Bucharest Daily News - May 3, 2005
13. Business Week (1994). New Worlds to Conquer. 28 February 1994, 50-52.
14. C a r u , A., C o v a , B. (2008). Small versus big stories in framing consumption experiences, Qualitative Market Research: An International Journal (11, 2), pp. 166-176.
15. C o a t s w o r t h . J. H. (2004). Globalization: Culture and Education in the New Millennium. Book by Marcelo M. Suárez-Orozco, Desirée Baolian Qin-Hilliard; University of California Press, 2004.
16. C o n t r a c t o r , F.J., K u n d u , S.K., H s u , C. (2003), A three-stage theory of international expansion: the link between multinationality and performance in the service sector, Journal of International Business Studies, Vol. 34, pp. 5-18.
17. D ’ A n d r a d e , R. (1995), The Development of Cognitive Anthropology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
18. D ’ A v e n i , R. A. (1994). Hypercompetition. New York: Harper Business.
19. D e n z i n , N. K., L i n c o l n , Y. S. (2005). Handbook of Qualitative Research, Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
20. D e s j e u x D. (1990). L’ethnomarketing. Un nouveau soufflé pour les études de comportement des consommateurs, Sciences Humaines, 1, November, 38-39.
21. D i c k e n , P., T h r i f t , N. (1992). The organization of production and the production of organization: why business enterprises matter in the study of geographical industrialization.
Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers NS 17, 279–91.
22. D i m ă n c e s c u , D. (n.d.). Oil Empires: Romania at the Crossroads; Retrived on June 2, 2010, from http://www.roconsulboston.com/Pages/InfoPages/Commentary/OilEmpires.html
23. E d e n , L. , S t e f a i n e L. (2001). Introduction to the symposium multinational: The Janus Face of Globalization. Journal of International Business Studies, 32(3): 383-400.
24. G a r r e t t e , G. (2000). The causes of globalization, Comparative Political Studies, 33(6/7): 941-91.
25. G r a b h e r , G. (1993). Rediscovering the social in the economics of interfirm relations. In Grabher, G., editor, The embedded firm, London: Routledge, 1–32.
26. G e e r t z , C. (2000). Light: Anthropological Reflections on Philosophical Topics, Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
27. G i d d e n s , A. (1990) The Consequences of Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
28. H a k k e n , D. (1999). Cyborgs@Cyberspace? An Ethnographer Looks to the Future. Routledge London. Retrieved from www.quesita.com, on April 18, 2010.
29. H a l l , E. (1989). Beyond Culture, Doubleday, New York, NY.
30. H a n d w e r k e r , W. P., B o r g a t t i , S. P. (1998). Reasoning with numbers, in Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, ed. H. Russell Bernard. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira.
31. H a n d w e r k e r , W. P. (2002), The Construct Validity of Cultures: Cultural Diversity, Culture Theory, and a Method for Ethnography, American Anthropologist, 104 (1), 106-122.
32. H i l l , C. (2002). International Business, 3rd ed., McGraw Hill, Boston, MA.
33. J a i s h a n k a r , G. (1998). Converging trends within the European Union: Insights from an analysis of diffusion patterns , Journal of International Marketing , Vol. 6 , No. 2 , pp. 32 – 48 .
34. J o n h s t o n , G. (2005). Leveling the Field, Marketing Research, Winter, pp.16-20.
35. K a l a f a t i s , S.P. (2000). Buyer-seller relationships along channels of distribution, Industrial Marketing Management, Vol. 31, pp. 215-28.
36. K u m a r , V., J a i s h a n k a r , G., E c h a m b a d i , R. (1998). Cross-national diffusion research:
What do we know and how certain are we?, Journal of Product Innovation Management , Vol. 15 , No. 3 , pp. 255 – 268.
37. K u n d a , G. (1992). Engineering Culture: Control and commitment in a High-tech Corporation, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, PA.
38. L a r e a u , A., S h u l t z , J. (1996). Journeys through Ethnography: Realistic Accounts of Fieldwork, Westview Press, 1996.
39. M c G o r r y , S. Y. (2000). Measurement in a cross-cultural environment: survey translation issues.
Qualitative Market Research. Bradford: Vol. 3, Iss. 2; pg. 74.
40. M o l l e , W. (2002). Globalization, regionalism, and labor markets: Should we recast the foundations of the EU regime in matters of regional (rural and urban) development? Regional Studies, 3 (2): 161- 72.
41. M o n j a r e t A., P r o v o s t G. (2003). Apprentis ethnologues...quand les élèves enquêtent, CRDP Académie de Créteil.
42. N a k a t a , C., S i v a k u m a r , K. (1995). Factors in emerging markets and their impact on first mover advantages. Working Paper No. 95-110. Marketing Science Institute, Cambridge, MA, 1995.
43. NATO (2004). http://www.nato.int/invitees2004/romania/glance.htm. Retrieved on June 24, 2010.
44. O m a r , O., K i r b y , A., B l a n k s o n , C. (2003). Acculturation and influence of ethnicity on market orientation of African and Caribbean companies in Britain, The Service Industries Journal, Vol. 23 No. 4, pp. 81-97.
45. O r o z c o , M. (2002). Globalization and migration: The impact of family remittances in Latin America, Latin American Politics and Society, 44(2): 41-66
46. P r a s a d , P. (2005). Crafting Qualitative Research: Working in the Postpositivist Traditions, M.E.
Sharpe, London.
47. R a j e e v B. (1997). Te Marketing environments: Base line conditions. Journal of International Marketing; Vol. 5, No. 4, 1997, pp. 95-114
48. R o s s , N. (2004). Culture and Cognition: Implications for Theory and Method. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.
49. R o m n e y , A. K. (1999), “Culture Consensus as a Statistical Model”, Current Anthropology, 40 (February), S103-S15.
50. R o m n e y , A. K., Bat chelder, W. H., W e l l e r , S. C. (1987). Recent Applications of Cultural Consensus Theory, American Behavioral Scientist, 31 (2), 163-77.
51. R o s e n , M. (1991). From text to action, Northwestern University Press, Evanston, IL.
52. S a x t o n , K.M. (1998). Customer satisfaction and measurement modeling. Presentation at AMA Winter Educators Conference, February, Austin, TX.
53. S c h m i t t , B.H. (1999), Experiential Marketing: How to Get Customers to Sense, Feel, Think, Act and Relate to Your Company and Brands, The Free Press, New York, NY.
54. S c h m i t t , B.H. (2003). Customer Experience Management, Wiley, Hoboken, NJ.
55. S c h w a r t z m a n n , H. (1995). Ethnography in Organizations, Sage, London.
56. S h e r r y , J. F. Jr. (1995). Contemporary Marketing and Consumer Behavior: An Anthropological Sourcebook. Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.
57. S h e r r y , J. F. Jr. (2008).The Ethnographer’s Apprentice: Trying Consumer Culture from the Outside In. Journal of Business Ethics (2008) 80:85–95.
58. S h e r r y , J. F., Jr., K o z i n e t s , R. V. (2001). Qualitative inquiry in marketing and consumer research, in D. Iacobucci (ed.), Kellogg on Marketing (John Wiley, New York), pp. 165–194.
59. S i d d i q u i , H. (2009). Romania an ideal gateway for Indian cos expansion. Retrieved form:
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/romania-an-ideal-gateway-for-indian-cos-expansion/458228/
on June 24, 2010.
60. S t o r p e r , M. (1992). The limits to globalization – technology districts and international trade.
Economic Geography 68, 60–93.
61. T a y l o r , E. B. (1891). Primitive Culture, John Murray, New York, USA .
62. W e l l e r , S. C. (1987). Shared Knowledge, Intracultural Variation, and Knowledge Aggregation, American Behavioral Scientist, 31 (2), 178-193.
63. W e l l e r , S. C. (1998). Structured Interviewing and Questionnaire Construction, in Handbook of Methods in Cultural Anthropology, H. Russell Bernard, ed. Walnut Creek, CA: Altamira Press.
64. W e l l e r , S. C., R o m n e y A. K. (1988). Systematic Data Collection. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage.
65. Y a n g , D. (2005). Culture matters to multinationals’ intellectual property businesses, Journal of World Business, Vol. 40, pp. 281-301.
Evaluarea impactului pătrunderii globale strategice din perspectiva culturală a cercetării în marketing: studiu de caz
asupra industriei de petrol şi gaze din România
Rezumat
Pătrunderea pe o nouă piaŃă constituie o metodă clasică de creştere a afacerilor. Capacitatea de a înŃelege experienŃa de consum a consumatorilor reprezintă o preocupare majoră a comercianŃilor de astăzi, în special cu privire la dezvoltarea unor abordăriexperimentale de marketing care încearcă să
orienteze consumatorii către achiziŃii (Schmitt, 1999, 2003). Cu precădere, prestatorii de servicii sunt presaŃi să privească în ansamblu tipurile de experienŃe care trebuie organizate pentru consumatori şi modul în care acestea ar trebui oferite. Una dintre strategiile de pătrundere pe piaŃă a oricărei organizaŃii globale de succes este de a cerceta piaŃa pe care urmează să pătrundă şi atunci majoritatea comercianŃilor se îndreaptă către etnografi.
Prin urmare, etnografia a conceput o compilaŃie de expuneri narative retrospective şi introspective ale consumatorului, numite „marile poveşti (big stories)”, puse în contrast cu „micile poveşti (little stories)”. Astfel, etnografia consumului a evoluat către o metodă dublă, caracterizată, pe de o parte, de observaŃiile care generează „mici poveşti”, iar, pe de altă parte, de introspecŃia care conduce la „mari poveşti”. Etnografia consumului a fost accentuată de trecerea de la expunerea narativă în retrospectivă organizată de cercetător în forma unui interviu, către expunerea introspectivă produsă, rafinată şi răspândită de consumator în forma unui text dintr-un jurnal scris, audio sau video (Caru şi Cova, 2008).
Acest articol non-empiric urmăreşte să detalieze rolurile majore ale etnografilor în momentul când o companie vrea să pătrundă pe o piaŃă internaŃională. România este cel mai mare producător de petrol din Europa Centrală şi de Est cu rezerve de 956 milioane de barili. Conform studiului realizat în 2008 de către BP Statistical Energy Survey, România a produs în medie 105.4 mii de barili de petrol pe zi în 2007, 0.12% din totalul global şi cu o schimbare de 0.9% faŃă de 2006. łara este un importator de petrol net şi, conform anchetei organizate în 2008 de către BP Statistical Energy Survey, România a consumat o medie de 229.29 mii de barili pe zi de petrol în 2007, 0.27% din valoarea totală globală, cu o modificare de 10.44 tbpd faŃă de anul 2006. Acest articol non-empiric îşi propune să analizeze strategiile de pătrundere ale companiilor multinaŃionale de petrol care doresc să facă afaceri în România.
