دانلود رایگان مقاله آموزش حرکت به خدمات خرده فروشی آمریکاانجمن آنلاین به عنوان پلت فرم فرهنگ پذیری

abstract

With consumer mobility on the rise, marketers need to understand how to best serve the increasing number of immigrants, expatriates, and foreign nationals. We examine an independent (non-corporate, brand agnostic) online forum that operates as a consumer acculturation platform and a consumer gift system, where Chinesespeaking consumers assist one another with navigating and even exploiting the American retail servicescape. Forum participants bestow the gift of experience on the collective to enhance the market-oriented communicative competence of forum participants necessary to master the American retail environment. Consumers on the platform systematically employ American English to reference brands and describe retail marketing promotions in a forum dominated by Chinese language. Specifically, we find that code switching, typically expected in early stages of language acquisition, becomes a robust norm to communicate specifically about American retail phenomena (metaphorical code switching) and bridge the gulf between home and host cultures. We offer firms four tactical strategies to attract and retain Chinese-language consumers.

9. Conclusion

With consumer mobility at an all-time high, the issue of best serving immigrant and foreign nationals is timely. We examined consumers' use of a peer-to-peer forum identifying: 1) forum purpose (what), 2) forum participation (why), and 3) forum language (how).This article contributes to our understanding of consumer acculturation theory and specifically focuses on the how acculturation agents in online acculturation platforms utilize language. We introduce code switching as an integral component of consumer acculturation, where acculturation agents move back and forth between language codes to effectively teach retail-oriented protocols and promotions to new market entrants. We demonstrate that systematic code switching based on topic areas, or metaphorical code switching, allows acculturating consumers to import broad ideological constructs into the discussion signaled by language choice. The acculturation platform in the present study is a consumer gift system, a collective with generalized reciprocity norms supporting the notion of collective acculturation agents and the existence of a collective market maven.