Just how important is culture in marketing, or even in daily life?
One thing I have noticed throughout my entire life that has consistently happened to me, not often enough for it to become annoying, but frequently enough so that I notice the trend, is how prideful my parents are of their Chinese cultures.
A great example is chopsticks. One night, as I was getting my usual fork from the drawer, my mom suddenly says to me, “Can you use chopsticks?” (in Chinese, obviously). “Why?” “Because we’re Chinese”. Just how does my ethnicity factor into my utensil choices? At the end of the day, chopsticks are just two wooden sticks of medium quality, and are perhaps even more cumbersome to use than a fork. And I’m fairly proficient with both instruments, so I’m not purposefully picking the fork to avoid using chopsticks.
As a side note, the reason why I use forks in the first place is because it’s difficult to eat rice, a main staple of Chinese food, with chopsticks. Just how ironic is that?
In a multicultural dominated society of North America, just how much can marketing wield this ethnic influence on peoples’ lives? We all know how detailed market research could become, but how is it possible to quantify, and will something so simple as people choosing to use chopsticks over forks translate into a marketing strategy?