A COMMENT ON A REVIEW: International Consumer Behavior: Its Impact on Marketing Strategy Development

Citation

Coskun Samli, A. (1998), "A COMMENT ON A REVIEW: International Consumer Behavior: Its Impact on Marketing Strategy Development", Journal of Consumer Marketing, Vol. 15 No. 1, pp. 82-83. https://doi.org/10.1108/jcm.1998.15.1.82.4

Professor Robert Lawrence has kindly reviewed my book noted above.

I must say I have some difficulty understanding his motives in reviewing this book. I have always assumed that in reviewing a book first, the reviewer gives some information about the book by comparing it to existing books; second, the reviewer critiques the strengths and weaknesses of the book; third, the reviewer evaluates the contributions of the book; and finally the reviewer tries to provide (from his/her wisdom) some guidance to future research efforts on the topic the book is dealing with.

Unfortunately, Professor Lawrence fails in all of these accounts. From reading this book review, one (particularly the author) gets the impression that this gentleman did not bother reading even the preface of the book.

Although critical, culture is not the focal point of the book. The key contribution of this one‐of‐a‐kind publication (there are no other attempts as far as I know regarding a book on international consumer behavior by others), is the development of a general theory of international consumer behavior (Introduction and Chapter 5). Professor Lawrence, this is new under the sun.

If we look at numerous consumer behavior books that exist in the literature, we realize that they all treat the international dimension as a subset of American consumer behavior theory. This perhaps is one of the reasons why the US trade deficit with the rest of the world is so great and still growing. International consumer behavior is certainly not well understood, unlike what Professor Lawrence claims, by international marketers. Indeed, if we knew enough about international consumer behavior we would learn to satisfy consumers around the world with our goods and services. Instead, we are continuously importing more than we are exporting and usually are taking an ethnocentric (and certainly) a dysfunctional marketing approach in world markets.

Perhaps one of the reasons for our failure in international markets is what Professor Lawrence reflects in his review: “there is nothing new under the sun” and “international marketers know”. Wrong, Professor Lawrence, every day we are adding more to the knowledge pool and intellectual capital regarding international marketing. And wrong again, Professor Lawrence, international marketers simply don’t know (at least many of them that I am familiar with).

Of course, if you pick out the most unimportant quotations from the book, such as “have knowledge of the host country”, you deprive yourself and your reader of access to this information explosion and intellectual capital development. This book, I hope, has more to contribute than that simple quotation.

Why don’t you try some of the concepts that the book explores such as: “Culture screen, classification of cultures, Wa, Inhwa and Quanxi”; the use of diffusion theory, learning versus involvement and much more.

Now, are these simplistic concepts? I hope to tell you that they are not. But then we see what we want to see and we read what we want to read. So is my theory simplistic? Please read the book a bit more carefully. Better yet, let the readers decide.

Thanks, however, for at least bringing my book before the public eye.