Challenges and Opportunities for Services Marketers in a Culturally Diverse Global Marketplace

Introduction

In the last couple of decades, rapid globalization has led to an increase in international travel,tourism and immigration, which in turn are creating a culturally diverse and complex global marketplace by bringing together customers and employees from different cultural and ethnic backgrounds (Sharma, Tam and Kim, 2009, 2012). This development offers new challenges and opportunities for services marketers because the culturally diverse customers and employees have significantly different expectations, perceptions and evaluations about service quality and its various dimensions (Etgar and Fuchs, 2011; Morales and Ladhari, 2011; Schoefer, 2010).

While the increase in the number of such intercultural interactions offer additional business opportunities to both local and global services marketers, it is also becoming difficult to design appropriate service offers to match the unique needs of culturally diverse customers and to deliver these through their service employees who may be used to a mono-cultural service environment. Interestingly, a similar phenomenon is already prevalent in multi-cultural societies such as United States, UK and Singapore among the developed countries and India, Brazil and South Africa among the emerging markets (Demangeot, Broderick and Craig, 2015).

Prior research on intercultural service encounters examines the role of cross-cultural consumer to consumer interactions (Johnson and Grier, 2013), emotional labour (Chuapetcharasopon, 2014), employee stress and coping (Wang and Mattila, 2010), preference for ethnic service staff (Baumann and Setogawa, 2014), attributions (Tam, Sharma and Kim, 2014) and intercultural communication competence (Ihtiyar and Ahmad, 2015). More recent research also explores the roles of moderators such as service role and outcome (Sharma, Tam and Kim, 2015), consumer ethnocentrism and intercultural competence (Sharma and Zhan, 2015) and personal cultural orientations (Sharma, Zhan and Su, 2015).

Task

Submit a Research Report of (2800- 3000) words on the theme Challenges and opportunities for Services Marketers in a Culturally Diverse Global Marketplace. Throughout you must demonstrate your wider reading of appropriate academic literature (i.e. fully referenced using Harvard or APA format), in order to support your viewpoints.

SUBMISSION GUIDELINES:

1) SUBMIT both HARD COPY and SOFT COPY of the RESEARCH REPORT before 3:00 PM, WEDNESDAY, MAY 10, 2017.

2) The Research Report should be based on a through literature review of not less than 7 scholarly papers and not more than 10 scholarly papers.

3) At the end of the report the references of the research papers should be mentioned in either APA or Harvard format.

4) Within the report in-text citations should also follow the same APA or Harvard format.

5) You need to write a report on the basis of your understanding of the research papers and make sure there is no plagiarism (don't copy paste the same text as written in the research paper you have referred to, it is required that you understand the idea and write it in your own words)

6) You should only refer to the scholarly articles published in the provided list of 82 journals.

7) It is mandatory to include two research papers for the five journal names highlighted in yellow

List of Journals
1. Journal of Marketing
2. Journal of Marketing Research
3. Journal of The Association of Consumer Research
4. Marketing Science
5. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science
6. Journal of Interactive Marketing
7. International Journal of Research in Marketing
8. Journal of Consumer Psychology

Suggested Topics

- Differences in the impact of personal cultural values and national cultural dimensions on customers and employees involved in inter-cultural service encounters.

- Implications for services marketers in terms of service design and delivery mechanisms in response to the cultural differences among their customers and employees.

- Interactions among cultural, socio-economic and demographic variables in their influence on diverse groups of customers and employees.

- Role of psychographic and socio-psychological processes such as attributions, stereotypes, cross-cultural adjustment and adaptation in inter-cultural service encounters.

- Differences in the influence of intercultural competence, intercultural sensitivity and cultural intelligence in intercultural service encounters

- Cross-sectional versus developmental perspective of cross-cultural adjustment and adaptation; Impact of different stages of cross-cultural adjustment on culturally diverse customers and employees.

- Differences in marketing strategies adopted by local and global services marketers to understand and address the cultural differences among their customers and employees (e.g., standardization vs. customization, localization vs. globalization)

- Intercultural friction and conflict between service employees and customers and the resolution strategies; service failure and recovery in intercultural service encounters.

- How to foster trust and relationship in an intercultural service encounter setting?

- Role of internal marketing in creating a service culture among culturally diverse employees and their colleagues inside the service firm so that they could better deal with culturally diverse customers in intercultural service encounters.

- Implications of culturally diverse marketplaces for various elements of the marketing mix, including the core product or service, packaging, features, delivery process, employee selection and training, services cape design etc.

- How to identify and develop new services to cater to culturally diverse customers; role of market research, service innovation and co-creation in new service design?

- How to address and leverage current themes of corporate social responsibility, environment protection and sustainability in the culturally diverse global marketplace?