Marketer Acculturation: The Changer and the Changed

Adapting to consumers from another culture is a quintessential task for marketers in the global marketplace. This research investigates marketers’ processes of multicultural learning and adaptation using ethnographic methods in a longitudinal study of an ethnic marketplace in the United States. The authors derive an empirical model of individual marketer acculturation that consists of learning and translation processes, adaptation strategies, and their outcomes. The findings indicate that marketers serve as bicultural mediators, both accommodating their consumers and working to alter their consumption patterns to bring them into line with their own ethnic and larger U.S. national market customs. Marketers’ adaptation to the cultural characteristics and needs of their clientele results in changes to themselves, their firms, consumers, and, ultimately, the marketplace. The authors contribute to a theoretical understanding of the complex dialectical relationships between marketers and consumers, which together constitute culture in the contemporary marketplace.