Chapter 1: What You'll Find Here

(The full-text version of The Cultural Psyche of India: Guidance for the U.S. Marketer can be downloaded for Kindle here.)

Knowing your target audience, even in your home country, requires recognizing and setting aside your own assumptions about consumers’ thoughts and feelings. This is a difficult thing to do because assumptions, unless they are confronted, exist below the level of conscious awareness. Not only must marketers identify relevant assumptions from within their target audience, they must be equally on guard against making decisions based on their own taken-for-granted assumptions.

The latter imperative is actually more difficult, especially when marketing to customers within a culture whose values, beliefs and other important norms are very different from our own. Yet marketers cannot afford to let their personal or cultural norms get in the way of customer understanding. This ever-so-daunting challenge requires learning to view one’s own culture, not as “right” or as “the way things ought to be,” but as a lens through which our perceptions of other cultures are colored and shaded.

We’ve all heard anecdotes about cross-cultural product failures and market-entry endeavors that happened because no one thought to investigate translation issues or lifestyle routines and practices or even differences in legal and regulatory requirements. Certainly, you should do all of that –whether by googling, reading, or consulting with professionals who are experts in their domains.

This book, however, is about something much more basic – in fact, so basic, so taken-for-granted that it’s actually hidden. Like the proverbial iceberg (French & Bell, 1971), most of which exists beneath the surface of the sea, most of the norms that comprise culture – whether the culture in question belongs to an organization or a nation – are, indeed, hidden. By norms, I am referring to values, practices and beliefs – that is, the abstract cultural underpinnings that will be explored when we compare the U.S. and India in the chapters that follow.

So then, The Cultural Psyche of India: Guidance for the U.S. Marketer is as much about understanding the hidden aspects of U.S. culture as it is surfacing the hidden context, norms, values, practices and beliefs that describe India. In other words, Indian norms that may seem odd to those of us who grew up in the U.S. are only “odd” because they are different from our own norms – and by taking a closer look at those differences, we can slowly begin to surface the norms of our own culture. Certainly, we may prefer our own norms much of the time, but if we are going to conduct business outside the U.S., we cannot afford to ignore the influence of cross-cultural norms or behave as though other cultures are inferior simply because their “normal” isn’t our “normal.”

Although this book was written in just four months, the study that informs it was conducted over the course of about two years, during which time more than 500 references from the cross-cultural literature were reviewed. Because the underpinnings of this effort are scholarly (e.g. mostly from the peer-reviewed academic literature), some of the terminology is a bit technical. But after all, the social sciences (anthropology, sociology, psychology and the organizational sciences) ARE sciences. However, I’ve tried to write the text in conversational language because managers really don’t have the inclination or the time to mire themselves in academically written readings. Even so, this may not be the book that you want to curl up with at the end of a long day. It may be more valuable as a reference to be consulted over time as the need arises with regard to a specific product, positioning or branding. In particular, Chapters 3 and 4 (the Project GLOBE and Schwartz dimensions, respectively) are fairly complex. If you wish to skim them on first reading and then read ahead, that wouldn’t be a bad approach. The frameworks presented in Chapters 5 and 6 (social axioms and Tightness-Looseness, respectively) are easier to grasp because they have fewer components, yet they could not be presented first because they refer back often to Chapters 3 and 4.

Most likely, you will be encountering these cross-cultural frameworks for the first time – so expect a bit of a learning curve. The good news is that once you become familiar with the frameworks and their dimensions, you won’t have to learn them again should you wish to read the country-specific ebooks that will be written next. Because the “BRIC” countries (Brazil, Russia, India and China) seem to be where most of the cross-cultural business buzz is hovering at the moment, our look at India will be followed soon by projects that compare the U.S. – again, from a marketing perspective – with Brazil, Russia and China. That initial collection will be the first in my Theory and Evidence at Work Series®, which will, ultimately, focus on a range of topics of business and workplace interest.

Please keep in mind that the frameworks you’re about to become acquainted with are relevant for the U.S. and India as societies. As an individual, you may read about a particular U.S. societal dimension and think, “That can’t be right. I’m from the U.S., and I don’t think like that.” No, but your culture – as an entity – does, which brings us to a fundamental distinction: “within-culture” versus “between-culture.” The societal-level frameworks to be introduced shortly allow us to compare cultures, providing us with a “between-cultures” perspective. They don’t tell us anything about what happens “within” a culture. In fact, variation among norms within a culture may be as great as the variation between two cultures. That’s why societal-level frameworks are useful for broad applications, such as marketing, where the performance of a product or brand depends on the behavior of a society-at-large or very large groups within the society.

The Ecological Fallacy

A related idea is a concept that Dutch sociologist Geert Hofstede, Ph.D., referred to as the “ecological fallacy.” It simply means that the application of societal-level findings to individuals is fallacious – or to put it more colloquially, “wrong.” Conversely, making assumptions about an entire culture based on a single individual from that culture represents “the reverse ecological fallacy,” or as it’s known informally, “stereotyping.” To state it another way – again referring to Hofstede’s work – individuals are not miniature versions of their cultures of origin, and cultures are not king-sized individuals. Individuals and cultures are not only different entities, they are different “kinds” of entities with different properties. To illustrate, one of the most familiar cross-cultural distinctions is Collectivism-versus-Individualism, referring primarily to the difference between viewing the self as part of a group versus being concerned with taking care of yourself and your immediate family. Only countries can be Collectivist or Individualist. People cannot. The architects of a couple of the frameworks have also built individual-level versions that can be used to assess groups and organizations, but that’s a different issue, one that we’ll touch on in Chapter 7. For now, just be on guard against reading about a dimension and thinking “Hey, that sounds like me.” Again, here, we are referring to societies. Usually, these societies are countries, although in some cases, they may be regions within countries – for example, German- versus French-speaking Switzerland – or cultural groups within countries such as black South Africa versus white South Africa.

Precisely because the societal-level frameworks are relevant for societies, they will only be relevant for your target audience to the extent that your target audience reflects its society at large. If you are working with a very specific subset of a society, you will still need to do some marketing research to test your positioning or branding for its relevance within that particular audience. Nevertheless, the societal-level findings will at least provide you with a point of departure that unmasks U.S.-based assumptions in comparison to India as a society.

Cross-Cultural Literacy as an Organizational Competency

If you happen to be in a senior-level leadership and policy-making position within your organization, you should know that the frameworks presented in the chapters that follow can inform not only marketing issues – but also the cross-cultural interaction that is becoming increasingly necessary throughout organizations, particularly with regard to human resources policies and practices.

If you really want to develop cross-cultural literacy as a competency for your organization, the frameworks and their application can be taught – to key stakeholders through individual tutoring or to groups of employees through a series of workshops, offered perhaps through your organization’s corporate university. The complexity associated with learning the frameworks and their dimensions may seem a bit daunting at first, but I am of the opinion that it’s far less daunting than learning to read music or becoming fluent in a new language.

It’s also quite necessary.

The time has come – as technology continues to drive globalization – for multi-nationals to acknowledge the need to develop cross-cultural literacy as an organizational competency. Thanks to decades of research from organizational scientists who are legends in their own fields but virtually unknown beyond them, this is now possible. We can now look at almost any country through the lens of almost any other country and apply pre-emptive metrics that let us consider whether our cross-cultural dealings have a chance to succeed over both the near- and the long-term or will fail miserably and come back to bite organizations in their collective derrieres. Unlike internal organizational mandates and grand experiments that fail, get quietly swept under the rug, and never get put on the agenda for evaluation, product and marketing failures can become very public – sometimes embarrassingly so, sometimes punitively. In that respect, marketers are under greater pressure than human resources or supply chain managers, for example, to “get it right the first time” or at least not to get it disastrously wrong. My hope for the near term is that the wisdom of becoming cross-culturally literate will appeal to marketers as well as executive management for this reason. With regard to the long term, the hope is more far-reaching. Perhaps organizations and even governments will one day look back and wonder “How could we not have done that.”

Chapter 2

Context (high-versus-low), based on the work of cultural anthropologist Edward T. Hall, Ph.D., who also introduced polychronic-versus-monochronic time, and proxemics (use of space). Key themes: The nature of culture, context as hidden, the limitations of personal experience as a basis for understanding other cultures, context as cultural shorthand, other cultures as revealed in the form of deviation from one’s own culture, developing cross-cultural psychological literacy as a competency. Anecdotes: Wal-Mart’s failure in Germany, the stereotype of the “loud” American.

Chapter 3

Project GLOBE, which compares societal practices (as is) versus values (should be) on nine dimensions, based conceptually on Hofstede’s cultural values. Key themes: Pain points as revealing within-society conflict, pain points as reflections of dissatisfaction versus willingness to accept change. Tangentials and anecdotes: India as a stage-1 World Economic Forum economy, The Whitehall Studies and the harmful cardiovascular effects of low-control, high-demand work environments, power failures in India, corruption as an indirect tax, human development in India, Indian bank CEO Chanda Kochhar, quality of life and opportunities for women, Kellogg’s initial failure in India, use of focus groups, religion, vegetarianism. Positioning implications: Enhanced perceptions of voice or control, performance improvement and innovation messaging, corporate social responsibility, perils of over-estimating market size, women as a target demographic, status enhancement. To restate a point made a few paragraphs prior, you may wish to skim chapters 3 and 4 on first reading. If that’s the case, just read the definitions of each of the nine dimensions, glance at the graphs, and move on. You can always come back, and you may find the need to do that anyway.

Chapter 4

The Schwartz values, which represent the cultural pressures that societies exert on their members. Key themes: Values and relationships between oppositional values as a reflection of societal-level dissonance. Tangentials and anecdotes: Unipolar versus bi-polar opposites, the U.S.’s poor showing on Intellectual Autonomy, Egalitarianism and foreign direct investment flows, cross-cultural market-entry difficulties and failures (South Korean Daewoo into France, U.S.-based Motorola into South Korea, Swedish IKEA into the U.S., U.S-based Lincoln Electric globally). Like Chapter 3, Chapter 4 is quite complex, so as with Chapter 3, it’s really OK if all you do is read the descriptions of the values, glance at the graphics, read the anecdotes, and move on. Should you find yourself dealing with a specific issue, that’s when scrutinizing the comparative metrics on a particular dimension is likely to be most helpful.

Chapter 5

Bond and Leung’s social axioms, which are beliefs about how the world works. Key themes: Beliefs as augmenting the predictive power of values. Tangentials and anecdotes: Organizational silence, intervening (mediating and moderating) variables, the perils of over-promising, use of variations of “life,” Union Carbide’s 1984 gas explosion in India, theories of flux and transformation (autopoesis, organizational narcissism, shifting attractors, chaos and complexity theory, mutual causality), the demise of the passenger pigeon, the large-tooth aspen growing from the steeple of the courthouse in Greensburg, Ind., the Tylenol-poisoning murders of 1982, pedophilia within the Catholic church and the Boy Scouts of America. Positioning implications: Norm violation, the daily struggle made easier. I must warn you that the flux and transformation section of this chapter is “out there.” However, if you enjoy thinking about karma and how it might be considered from a scientific basis, this section is for you.

Chapter 6

Gelfand’s Tightness versus Looseness, which is about whether societies punish and sanction when cultural norms are violated – or, instead, tolerate deviation from norms and look the other way. Tangentials and anecdotes: the 2011 killing by police of an unarmed robbery suspect in Pakistan, a Pakistani mob breaking into a police station in December of 2012 and burning alive a man jailed on charges of desecrating the Koran; Gillette’s “shaving well” positioning; effect sizes and correlation coefficients; the death of a young woman after being gang-raped on a public bus in New Delhi; segregation of women in Arab societies; power including French and Raven’s classic taxonomy of power, power as relational, 50 Cent (the rapper) and expert power. Positioning implications: Help with the daily struggle, pride in one’s in-groups and disruption of in-group solidarity, saving for the future. Readers may find this chapter to be the most intuitive, and perhaps, the discussion of power to be one of the book’s more interesting sections.

Chapter 7

The application of cross-cultural research in the context of organizational psychology and the academic-practitioner divide. For the most part, this chapter captures postponed digressions: differences in business versus academic writing and perspectives, the academic-practitioner divide and the need for bridgers, quantitative versus qualitative research (including projective methods), the perils of home-baked surveys, some recommendations for your business library, validity of included cross-cultural frameworks as well as frameworks that were intentionally omitted, importance of distinguishing levels of analysis, testing your target audience, individual-level cross-cultural frameworks, focus groups and trust, what goes around comes around.

Appendix A: Source Material

This section includes a chapter-by-chapter list of references as well as a few additional recommended readings. In the interest of readability, I did not always insert citations within text, which I would have done had this little book been written primarily for an academic audience. The source material at the end of the book includes something in the range of 120 citations, and I really didn’t see the point in adding them to the text each and every time one of them was referenced. However, the references are organized by chapter, so I think it should be fairly easy to find the one you need should you be interested in verifying the information or doing a bit of further reading.

Appendix B: My Online Footprint

As an organizational psychology consultant, I do a fair amount of writing about various aspects of cross-cultural research as well as the application of organizational psychology. In Chapter 8, you’ll find links to my teaching Website as well as other online efforts.

Appendix C: Image credits

I am especially indebted to Mark Mock for allowing me to use the cover image of the elephant, which he shot while on assignment in India in 2011. In Appendix B, you’ll find credits for the other images that illustrate abstract concepts used to represent the various dimensions.

In the chapters that follow, you will be introduced not only to the relevant cross-cultural frameworks – but also to individuals who served as informants (the social research term) from within India. I am deeply indebted to Agent Prasad, in particular. He is a family practice physician and fiction-writer who, incidentally, chose his own pseudonym. For the past four months, he has responded to countless emails and questions, all with patience and good humor as well as a desire to know about the U.S. as a culture. You will also meet Nisha and Asha. Nisha is human resources professional, who was born in India and grew up there but now lives in Belgium. Asha, also a human resources professional, is a manager in India. All of the names within other anecdotes have been changed to protect the anonymity of the individuals to which they refer.

I am also indebted to the architects of the cross-cultural frameworks that now make country comparisons possible from a theory- and evidence-based perspective. Paul Hanges, Ph.D. (Project GLOBE), Shalom Schwartz, Ph.D. (the Schwartz values), Michael Harris Bond, Ph.D. (Bond and Leung’s social axioms) and Michele Gelfand Ph.D. (Tightness-Looseness) have all been gracious in answering questions and, in some cases, even providing raw data.

One style issue that bears mention is the use of the word “American.” It’s really the only descriptor that those of us from the U.S. have to refer to our culture when we need an adjective. Unlike Germans, Indians, Japanese, Australians (you get the idea), we can’t really call ourselves “U.S.ians;” yet use of the term “American” to mean “someone from the U.S.” is sometimes criticized on the basis that Canadians are North Americans, and individuals from Latin, Central and South American countries are also “Americans.” To some, this is an issue of splitting hairs; but to others, it’s important. There’s no way to be entirely politically correct, so I’ve split the difference by using the term “(U.S.) American” when the words are my own. In quotes, “American” is used alone as spoken by the speaker.

Finally, I hope nothing I’ve written will be perceived as offensive; but should offense be taken, please know that it was not intended. If you disagree with any of my conclusions or wish to share your own opinions and experience, please write. I’m always looking for cross-cultural anecdotes because nothing illustrates a complex point better than an interesting story.