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This course focuses on global marketing and advertising with the goal of showing students the importance of recognizing and appreciating cultural differences. The semester will begin with the concept of global marketing, which was first described by Harvard professor Theodore Levitt. Based on the assumption that consumers around the world had the same desires and basic needs, he ignored the importance of cultural differences in global marketing. This led to a fierce debate. Ultimately three main schools of thought emerged on the issue. According to one school, advertisers should focus on the similarties of consumers worldwide (standardization). A second school argues that advertisers must take cultural differences into account (localization). And, the third school argues for a combination of these two strategies. We will consider all three approaches in this course.

Tackling the subject of global marketing and advertising is an ambitious undertaking. For one thing, it requires an understanding of globalization--a rigorous course in its own right. It also requires students to mine the nuggests of their undergraduate education. They must consider and show how their courses in literature, history, fine arts, linguistics, anthropology, sociology, psychology, classics, foreign languages and so on can be used to explain how global marketing and advertising work. Studens will quickly discover that this topic raises more questions than it answers. That, however, is what makes it an ideal topic.

To make this course manageable, we will adopt a social psychological perspective in seeking to understand how advertising works. In general, this means that we will consider how advertising influences people's thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. More specifically, we will narrow our theoretical approach by laying the course's foundation upon the work of Geert Hofstede, a social psychologist who identified five dimensions of national culture: power distance, individualism/collectivism, masculinity/feminity, uncertainty avoidance, and long-term orientation. Built upon this foundation, students will then explore the challenges of global marketing and advertising.

Class meetings will take the form of problem-based discussions, where students can raise questions, discuss ideas, and offer solutions for particular problems. These classes will prepare students for the final project, a presentation of a multinational advertising campaign.

GLOBAL ADVERTISERS

Procter & Gamble
Unilever
Toyota
General Motors
Renault
Coca-Cola
PepsiCo
L'Oreal
Shiseido
McDonald's

ADVERTISING AGENCIES

Dentsu
BBDO Worldwide
McCann-Erickson
J. Walter Thompson
Publicis Worldwide
DDB Worldwide
Leo Burnett Worldwide
Euro RSCG Worldwide
Olgivy & Mather Worldwide
TBWA Worldwide

Markets are people, not products. There may be global products, but there are no global people. There may be global brands, but there are no global motivations for buying those brands.

--Marieke de Mooij, 2005