Consumer empowerment in multicultural marketplaces: Navigating multicultural identities to reduce consumer vulnerability

In the context of increasing cultural diversity, consumers are negotiating their identities and subsequent behaviours within multiple cultures and subcultures. Multicultural marketplaces include consumers from diverse ethnic groups, religious groups, nationalities, people living in particular geographic regions or groups that share common physical/mental disabilities, beliefs, values, attitudes or a way of life. Identity negotiations within a multicultural marketplace may present consumers with particular vulnerability challenges when a state of powerlessness arises from asymmetric marketplace exchange. Through the use of introspective vignettes, this paper identifies major categories of coping behaviours and shows that some coping strategies exacerbate and perpetuate vulnerabilities, while others prove beneficial and facilitate building resilience. The paper calls for an advocacy framework for consumer empowerment in multicultural marketplaces by developing a comprehensive framework of coping strategies that enhance consumer empowerment and resilience

Branding beyond prejudice : cultural branding and consumer well-being in multicultural marketplaces

Today’s marketplaces are increasingly multicultural as more individuals negotiate complex cultural identities. Brands play a role in materializing individual identities – however, little is known about how culture-based brand appeals might affect consumers’ identity dynamics, positively or negatively. The paper provides a framework and a model that examines the interaction between three different types of multicultural marketplaces (assimilation, separation, and mutual integration) and different voices that brands might use in their cultural appeals (Branding Ignorance, Branding Tolerance, and Branding Engagement). It identifies how these different voices (strategies) might exacerbate consumer vulnerabilities in different types of marketplaces and provides recommendations for how to use culture-based branding appeals in a benevolent manner

No harm done? Culture-based branding and its impact on consumer vulnerability: a research agenda

Brands, as actors participating in the marketplace's social discourse, have the ability to lower and, equally, raise social and cultural boundaries. As such, it is important to understand better effects of brand-related cultural cues on consumer vulnerability, especially given the unprecedented diversification of cultural contexts in society today. First, we discuss the importance and complexity of cultural identity in the marketplace. Next, we explore the role of brands in creating social identity conflict. Finally, based on marketplace complexities and the role of brands as social actors, we offer several suggestions for research that will increase our understanding of how brand-based cultural cues might minimise feelings of consumer vulnerability and lower social and cultural boundaries within society. We demonstrate that relying on demographic characteristics when addressing cultural diversity in advertising appeals may result in misrepresentations or incomplete representations of complex cultural identities. Advertisers' failure to understand and reflect cultural identity complexities may aggravate consumer vulnerability and result in consumer withdrawal from the marketplace or from a particular brand. This paper calls for the need to deepen our understanding of mono- and multi-cultural consumer identification and behaviour in increasingly multi-cultural marketplaces. The social role of brands is to represent people's ideas about themselves and the world. An evolution in culture-based advertising and branding is proposed to address multiplicity in cultural identities and limit consumer vulnerability in the new reality of increasing cultural diversification in the marketplace. The paper contributes an augmented view of cultural identity that integrates links with multiple national, racial, ethnic groups and other cultural groups not connected to individuals through ancestry. It articulates the main research areas into consumer and brand vulnerabilities in multi-cultural marketplaces. Such a view would enable culture-based advertising and branding to enhance social cohesion in promoting cultural tolerance and diversity

Towards intercultural competency in multicultural marketplaces

Intercultural competency plays a pivotal role in creating a more equitable and just marketplace where situations of marketplace vulnerability are minimized and resiliency is enhanced. Intercultural competency is the ability to understand, adapt, and accommodate another’s culture. In this essay, a framework of intercultural competency development in multicultural marketplaces is presented. Resilience building actions for multicultural marketplace actors, specifically, consumers, businesses/marketers, community groups and NGOs, and policy makers, are discussed for three phases of intercultural competency development