Role of Culture in Consumer Marketing: Thematic Trajectories and Theoretical Roots

Abstract

Culture has been considered the primary motivator affecting consumers’ decisions for years. Despite the importance of consumer culture, the systematic review of literature studying consumer culture is less and remains highly fragmented. This study uses a topic modelling approach to explore the role of culture in marketing literature to propose a way forward for future researchers interested in this domain. The study helps to synthesise cultural impact in marketing with a specific focus on dominant research topics and key themes, presenting clarity to the extant knowledge base. This study offers two potential contributions to the research community. First, this study demonstrates the application of structured topic modelling as a text analytics method that helps to report the evolution and thematic structure of this rapidly expanding domain. Second, the scientometric analysis in this study maps the conceptual structure of research with interconnected research themes hidden in this domain.

Keywords

Consumer culture marketing structured topic modelling review

Introduction

In the modern world, the idea of consumer culture embraces core identity, which is oriented in line with consumption and anything that can be consumed. According to Arnould and Thompson (2005, p. 869), consumer culture is ‘a social arrangement in which the relations between lived culture and social resources, and between meaningful ways of life and the symbolic and material resources on which they depend, are mediated through markets’. In the last decade, consumer culture has been tremendously shaped by globalised processes. In fact, globalisation has led to the proliferation of shared values and beliefs cutting across borders, shaping renewed national identities with the adoption of a culture mix (Cleveland & Bartsch, 2018). In the process, closed cultural identities within national borders are being transformed from homogeneous to multicultural and multiethnic societies (Demangeot et al., 2015). Globally, this, in turn, has significantly reduced the notion of ‘distinctive consumers’, thereby blurring specific consumer identities. Magnusson and Westjohn (2019) believed that within a ‘consolidation state’ of consumer culture, socio-cultural variances redefine the interplay of national, ethnic and other local identities. The authors termed it as ‘neo-ethnicism’ (Cleveland, 2022), which re-emerges into ‘multiculturistic’ consumers. Therefore, consumers with their national self-concept now reflect upon multiple social identities, calling for a pressing need to study cultural integration (Cleveland & Bartikowski, 2023).

In fact, this multicultural paradigm differentiates a consumer who perceives culture as static and well-defined from a consumer who perceives culture as dynamic and interactive (Morris et al., 2015). The growing stream of research has looked to understand the effect of multiculturalism within the ambits of cross-culture psychology (Agyenim‐Boateng, 2023), marketing and international marketing (Alozie, 2010; Fazli-Salehi et al., 2022) domains. Therefore, marketers tend to position their products aiming at a ‘global consumer culture’, whereby they differentiate themselves as glocal (global + local) consumer advocates (Steenkamp, 2019). Interestingly, despite this ‘glocal consumerism’, consumer behaviour and cultural influences on consumer decision-making still top the research agendas and efficient marketing strategy for targeting glocal diaspora even today (Cleveland & Bartikowski, 2023).

Despite the importance of consumer culture, the systematic reviews of literature studying consumer culture are few. They remain highly fragmented in the domains of marketing except for rare anecdotes such as international business (Srivastava et al., 2020). The use of ‘culture’ in understanding consumer behaviour ‘holistically’ in existing marketing literature has led to a call for a systematic review. Both academics and practitioners still believe that a lot is to be known in terms of both understanding and establishing the theme. Thus, this systematic review helps synthesise the cultural impact in marketing, explicitly focusing on dominant research topics and key themes. Admittedly, this study offers two potential contributions: (a) It helps in scrutinising the evolution of the influence of ‘culture’ and ‘globalization’ and thereby brings about a ‘structure’ in this rapidly expanding domain, adopting a structured topic modelling technique which is an advanced text analytics methods based on machine learning (Das et al., 2023; Sharma et al., 2021). (b) The scientometric analysis reports the conceptual themes and visualises the keyword conceptual structure map with interconnected research areas hidden in this domain.

Methodology

Search Protocol and Data Cleaning

To develop a comprehensive search protocol for the current study, the terms ‘culture’ and ‘culturally’ were selected from the initial review of the literature. A Boolean operator ‘or’ in the topic field was used between the two terms. Then, we restructured our search with the Boolean operator ‘AND’ using another set of words representing the marketing domain (e.g., ‘marketing’, ‘marketer’, ‘consumer’ and ‘customer’), besides using an internal operator ‘OR’ in the title or keywords. We searched using the above-selected keywords starting from the year 1990 till 2020. We downloaded data from Scopus, which is Elsevier’s academic and citation database with more than 22,600 peer-reviewed titles. According to Veloutsou and Mafe (2020), Scopus is quite comprehensive in the coverage of marketing journals compared to other databases such as Web of Science. Moreover, Scopus offers specific selection mechanisms through structured search criteria. As Scopus contains full-test articles, conference proceedings and book chapters, we set the document type to ‘ar’ as a filter to select only articles.

Then, we filtered these articles, using ‘business’ as a field with a timeline up to 2020 considering the significant extraneous influence of the pandemic, which has the potential to distort the actual effect of culture on marketing for studies done in subsequent years. Our keyword search resulted in 8,225 articles. The metadata of all articles were retrieved from Scopus as a comma-separated file (.csv file). Next, we followed the CABS (2018) and Hazing (2020) journal quality list to filter marketing domain articles, which yielded 567 research papers published between 1990 and 2020.

Scientometric Analysis and Topic Modelling

We applied two sets of analytical algorithms (i.e., topic modelling and scientometric) to articulate the basic conceptual foundations of culture in the marketing domain. Topic modelling is an unsupervised machine learning technique that extracts the underlying topics (latent themes) by analysing text documents in a corpus (Blei et al., 2003). The most popular approach for topic modelling, namely, latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) by Blei et al. (2003) assumes that topics are a ‘distribution of words over a fixed vocabulary’ with ‘an assigned probability from 0 to 1’ and each document can be modelled as a probabilistic mixture of a fixed number of topics. The structured topic model (STM) is an advancement over LDA that allows incorporating document-specific metadata in the topic modelling process to discover how topics extracted from text document corpus evolve as per the metadata-based covariates (Roberts et al., 2019). STM estimates the semantic association of topics in the document corpus through a fast variational approximation using an expectation-maximisation algorithm and models the interplay among the metadata covariates and topical prevalence (Roberts et al., 2019). STM has been efficiently adopted to discover hidden topics and their temporal evolution across many disciplines, such as information management (Sharma et al., 2021) and investor attention (Goodell et al., 2022).

Analysis and Results

Keywords Occurrences Analysis

Generally, the key concepts and their interconnectedness form the underlying core of the conceptual structure of a theme. In our case, the keywords used in the research articles present an explanatory base to understand the concept (Sharma et al., 2021); thus, we attempt to analyse the most significant research keywords. Table 1 lists the most frequently used keywords in literature exploring culture in marketing. The analysis of top research keywords shows that the most frequent keywords in the articles are ‘culture (125)’, ‘national culture (95)’, ‘consumer behavior (80)’, ‘consumer culture (72)’, ‘international marketing (45)’, ‘consumer culture theory (42)’ and ‘China (32)’. In terms of index keywords, the most used keywords are ‘consumer behavior (7)’, ‘cultural influence (6)’, ‘retailing (6)’ and ‘marketing (5)’.

Table 1.

Top-10 Author and Index Keywords.

Author Keywords	Occurrences	Index Keywords	Occurrences
Culture	125	Consumption behaviour	7
National cultures	95	Cultural influence	6
Consumer behaviour	80	Retailing	6
Consumer culture	72	Marketing	5
International marketing	45	Information technology	4
Consumer culture theory	42	Apparel fabric	2
China	32	Consumer research	2
Globalisation	27	Fashion	2
Marketing strategy	26	Internet	2

Topical Trends for Research Keywords

Figure 1 shows the trend of the top-10 research keywords from the articles exploring culture in the marketing domain from 1998. The keywords from articles published before 1998 are not frequent, so these are not presented here. In the first decade (i.e., from 1998 to 2008), studies of ‘international marketing’, ‘national culture’ and ‘consumer behavior’ prevailed. Notably, at this point, studies with the keyword ‘national culture’ trended the most. Post 2010, studies on ‘China’, ‘culture’, ‘consumer culture’ and ‘consumer culture theory’ have been on the rise. Figure 2 effectively explains the evolution and growth of the top-10 research keywords graphically over the horizon. It is evident that, in the next decade (i.e., 2010–2020), studies with keywords such as ‘consumer culture’ and ‘consumer culture theory’ ruled the roost, while studies with only ‘culture’ as the keyword showed a declining trend.

Figure 1.

Temporal Topical Trends for Research Keywords.

Figure 2.

Top-10 Research Keywords Trends.

Thematic Evolution

The evolution of culture in the marketing domain is plotted in Figure 3 for different time intervals, using different cut points. Notably, temporal evolution is represented by edges and clusters, which are characterised by nodes within the network. We also used an inclusion index weighted by word occurrences method with a minimum weight index of 0.1. Thematic evolution was visualised through one cutting point (2012) as the number of articles published before it and after it is the same. Thematic evolution shows the dynamics related to major themes. Themes that do not evolve much are represented in the same colour shadow. However, themes that evolve very much are represented by splitting shadows connected to different colour nodes. For example, the major theme in the period 1990–2012 named ‘national culture’ evolved into ‘global consumer culture’ and ‘consumer behaviour’ in the next period (2013–2020).

Figure 3.

Thematic Evolution of Key Themes for 1990–2020 (Cutting Point 2012).

It was also evident that the theme ‘culture’ in the period 1990–2012 has evolved into ‘branding’, ‘communication’, ‘consumer culture’ and ‘culture in consumer behavior’. It is understandable that the domain was in its formative years. For example, Süerdem (1994) explained the assumption of consume theory and how it absorbs postmodern consumer identities, while Keillor and Hult (1999) contributed to this theme by explaining national cultural identities.

Further, the alluvial graph shows that ‘online communities’ theme in 1990–2012 was merged into ‘branding’ and intersected with ‘marketing systems’ during the 2013–2020 phase. Phase 2013–2020 records important transitions in the conceptual structure of the culture in the marketing field. Three important themes ‘consumer culture’, ‘marketing systems’ and ‘branding’ came to closure as compared to the previous phase. The development of ‘social media’ theme contributed to ‘national culture’, ‘emerging markets’ and ‘relationship marketing’.

The thematic analysis of major themes in a two-dimensional space using centrality as the x-axis and density as the y-axis is presented in Figure 4, which offers strategic insights on key emerged themes. As shown, the themes are classified and mapped into four quadrants (Callon et al., 1991). The keywords clustered and classified as the most prominent themes (called motor-themes) are shown in the upper-right quadrant. Similarly, specialised-peripheral themes are placed in the upper-left quadrant. The marginal-weak themes are shown in the lower-left quadrant, and transversal-basic themes are present in the lower-right quadrant. These transversal-basic themes of culture in marketing have been the most significant and do have the potential to be developed further. Our analyses identify many transversal-basic themes that will evolve more in the coming years.

Figure 4 reports that ‘culture’, ‘consumer culture’, ‘national culture’ and ‘globalization’ remained the basic themes in this phase. The theme ‘India’, ‘Chinese culture’ along with ‘acculturation’ emerged as a niche theme during this phase. Consumers learn, assimilate and/or integrate from different cultures with the host culture through a process known as acculturation (Khare & Jain, 2022), which became an important topic for consumer culture theory. Further, themes such as ‘national culture’, ‘consumer culture’ and ‘globalization’ have the potential to become academic hotspots in the future. We believe that identifying these future hotspots is a significant contribution to the current study.

Figure 4.

Thematic Analysis of Major Themes.

Future work studying the role of culture in the marketing domain may consider researching ‘consumer culture’ and ‘national culture’ in emerging markets, such as South Korea and India. Such studies would advance the theoretical explanation of high-context cultures. In addition, specialised themes, such as ‘acculturation’ and ‘social media’, may evolve to become generic themes for studies exploring the role of culture in the marketing domain. Importantly, specific themes, such as ‘customer service’ which in recent times has been gaining momentum, may shift from being a peripheral theme to a basic theme in the future, especially given the rising popularity of emerging markets context, such as ‘India’ and ‘China’.

We adopted multiple correspondence analysis (MCA) to uncover the conceptual structure of culture in the marketing stream. The proximity of keywords in articles was measured through similarity in their distribution which is portrayed in a closer in two-dimensional map. This clustering approach with MCA is one of the most widely used approaches that highlight relationships between keywords and emergent research trends in literature (Rejeb et al., 2022). Figure 5 represents a conceptual structure map based on MCA where the four research clusters are evident. Each cluster represents different research foci related to the scholars of different disciplines who contributed to their respective fields. The cluster in red primarily represents the studies related to marketing communication, advertising, branding and consumer behaviour. Strong insights can be drawn from this cluster such as how culture can affect marketing communication and brand consumption specific to celebrity advertising (Shah et al., 2023).

Figure 5.

Conceptual Structure Map Based on Multiple Correspondence Analysis.

The blue cluster represents national culture’s role in international marketing. For example, this cluster reflects a strong need to how national culture changes customer engagement practices while approaching international markets (Steinhoff et al., 2023). Furthermore, the green cluster relates to studies on consumer culture, consumption and identity. For instance, Hoang et al. (2023) advanced the understanding of how culture-driven consumer resistance (anti-consumer culture) through ethnographic data affects identity concerns and anti-consumption behaviour. Finally, the purple cluster represents the extant literature connecting culture to religion and consumer sociology. This cluster explains the role of religion as a culture identity affecting consumer behaviour in a societal context (Jafari et al., 2022).

Structural Topic Modelling

STM is performed on all the research documents exploring the role of culture in the marketing domain to extract the key research themes with the help of text analytics-based thematic analysis. The text corpus for STM-based topic modelling consisted of the document title, keyword terms and the research abstract. The internal functions of STM support identifying the optimal number of topics based on the ‘distinctiveness’ of latent topics to balance exclusivity and semantic coherence (Sharma et al., 2021). We executed 200 expectation-maximisation iterations for STM. However, the model converged after 90 repetitions using spectral initialisation (Roberts et al., 2019). STM resulted in the extraction of a total of 12 latent topics from the research documents corpus. We further assigned labels on the extracted topics, which were semantically meaningful, based on ‘top probable words of each topic’ (Sharma et al., 2021).

Topic 1 ‘online marketing communication’ used the top words ‘online’, ‘communication’, ‘marketing’, ‘culture’, ‘management’, ‘web’, ‘internet’, ‘website’, ‘business’ and ‘style’. Topic 2 used ‘consumer culture theory’ formed from the top words including ‘theory’, ‘consumer culture’, ‘consumer’, ‘consumption’, ‘research’, ‘social’, ‘CCT’, ‘cultural’, ‘market’ and ‘meaning’. The next extracted theme included ‘consumer culture and cultural effect’, encompassing words, such as ‘culture’, ‘consumer’, ‘cultural’, ‘effect’, ‘customer’, ‘national’, ‘distance’, ‘product’, ‘study’ and ‘cultures’ (Topic 3). The fourth topic contained words such as ‘consumer culture’, ‘communication’, ‘marketing’ and ‘food’ by highest frequency; it pertained to specific questions on the consumer culture effect on food consumption. Topic 5 is formed by words such as ‘national’, ‘culture’, ‘research’, ‘approach’, ‘design’ and ‘study’. Research in culture in the marketing domain addressed specific issues related to design, approach and study limitations related to data, cross-cultural settings and methodologies.

Further, Topic 6 included top words, such as ‘global’, ‘consumer culture’, ‘positioning’ and ‘brand’. Specifically, this topic is related to studies attempting to understand acculturation strategies in the global context. Words such as ‘service’, ‘customer’, ‘performance’ and satisfaction’ formed topic 7, which addressed issues related to customer service performance and resulting satisfaction. Topic 8 consisted of top words such as ‘consumer’, ‘shopping’, ‘fashion’ and ‘consumer culture’, addressing issues related to the role of culture in clothing, consumer roles and identities influencing fashion consumption. Topic 9 referred to top words, such as ‘retail’, ‘customer’, ‘culture’ and ‘research’, stressing the implications of consumer culture research in the retail settings. Topic 10 included words such as ‘consumer’, ‘attitude’, ‘product’, ‘country’ and ‘study’. This is obvious as the consumer culture shapes the consumer attitude differently and also varies with different products. Topic 11 revolved around words that included ‘brand’, ‘culture’, ‘engagement’ and ‘marketing’, underlining the role played by consumer culture in driving higher engagement in brand building. Lastly, topic 12 included the most repeated words, such as ‘Chinese’, ‘consumer’ and ‘values’, addressing studies that investigated Chinese consumer values. Table 2 presents all probable latent research themes/topics on culture in the marketing domain. The expected proportions of each topic in the text corpus of all research documents in the database are also provided in Table 2. Figure 6 provides a snapshot of each topic’s content using the word cloud.

Figure 6.

Word Clouds for Each Topic.

Table 2.

Dominant Topics in Research on Culture in Marketing.

Topic Number	Topic Label	Top Words	Top Constructs	Major Theories	Prevalence
1	Online marketing communication	Online, communication, marketing, culture, management, web, internet, website, business, style	Trust, communication frequency, communication style, cultural values	Commitment–trust theory, adult learning theory, social theory	4.36%
2	Consumer culture theory	Theory, consumer culture, consumer, consumption, research, social, CCT, cultural, market, meaning	Brand experience, consumer identity	Assemblage theory, consumer culture theory, processual theory	12.17%
3	Consumer culture and cultural effect	Culture, consumer, cultural, effect, customer, national, distance, product, study, cultures	Brand performance, customer engagement, brand attitude, engagement, customer aggression	Self-determination theory, regulatory focus theory, equity theory	11.29%
4	Food consumption and consumer culture	Consumption, consumer culture, marketing, food, sustainable, research, Asian, consumer, advertising, culture	Consumer resistance, consumer experience, pro-environmental self-identity	Non-representational theory, consumer culture theory, consumer acculturation theory	8.66%
5	National culture research	National, culture, research, approach, study, implications, design, methodology, cultural, limited	Consumer brand engagement, brand equity, consumer fanaticism, inter-firm marketing cooperation	Theory of reasoned action, social marketing theory, aesthetic theory	7.71%
6	Global consumer culture	Global, consumer culture, brand, consumer, globalisation, study, research, positioning, local, identity	Perceived brand globalness, consumer nationalism, national identity, consumer experience	Resource-based theory, signalling theory, accessibility-diagnosticity theory	9.69%
7	Customer service	Service, customer, study, marketing, business, performance, firms, market, financial, research	Customer equity, customers’ service gratuities, customer loyalty, consumer satisfaction	Performance theory, stigma theory, self-determination theory, justice theory	10.85%
8	Fashion, shopping and consumption	Consumer, shopping, fashion, consumption, consumer culture, research, young, study, identity, culture	Consumption experience, consumer ethics, consumer misbehaviour, shopping experiences	Consumer culture theory, theory of reasoned action	8.40%
9	Customer culture and retail	Culture, research, retailer, customer, retail, corporate, consumer, study, loyalty, implications	Customer loyalty, consumers’ commitment, brand equity	Consumer culture theory, global brand positioning theory	6.13%
10	Consumer attitude and product	Consumer, product, attitude, country, study, cultures, group, research, national, groups	Luxury consumption, customer experience, consumers’ brand evaluation, consumer susceptibility	Theory of reasoned action, means-end theory, categorisation theory	9.64%
11	Culture and branding	Brand, cultural, branding, consumer, culture, analysis, study, social, research, market	Cultural brand engagement, brand avoidance, consumer identity	Consumer culture theory, social comparison theory, acculturation theory	6.24%
12	Chinese values and culture	Chinese, consumer, values, study, gift, product, giving, market, culture, behaviour	Ethnocentric behaviour, consumers’ attitude, purchase intention, online consumer behaviour	Theory of planned behaviour	4.86%

Studies represented by topic 1 (online marketing communication), for instance, centred on communication across dissimilar cultures (Alteren & Tudoran, 2019), through Hofstede framework for web marketing (Capece & Di Pillo, 2019) for various contexts, such as Arab (Ghanem et al., 2013). The second topic (consumer culture theory) discussed the applicability of consumer culture theory (CCT) in marketing research, using ethnography using big data (Thompson, 2019), in consumer self-narratives (Gould, 2012), and sociology of consumption with consumer-gender-identity (Thompson & Üstüner, 2015). The third topic (consumer culture and cultural effect) comprised studies by Vomberg et al. (2020), Lee and Kacen (2008) and Yoon et al. (2011), among others. Specifically, they studied the effect of consumer culture on the reacquisition of the customer through psychological, planned and impulse purchase situations for individualistic and collectivistic countries in group choice settings. The fourth topic (food consumption and consumer culture) studied food culture, specific to alternative food consumption (Batat & Peter, 2020), food labelling in cross-culture research (Seo et al., 2015) and traveller food culture, using boundary crossing for short-term mobility (Bardhi et al., 2010).

The fifth topic (national culture research) focused on approach, methods and implications; for instance, consumers’ alcohol drinking behaviour/habits (Buyucek et al., 2018), glocalisation (de Mooij, 2017) and cultural boundness, using transaction cost economics approach (Steenkamp, 2001). The sixth topic (global consumer culture) is built on the works of Swoboda and Sinning (2018), Huang and He (2019), Westjohn et al. (2016), and others. They expanded the global consumer culture from the perspective of perceived brand globalness across multicultures, Confucian cultural values and emerging markets, along with regulations in global and local culture. The seventh topic (customer service) included the role of culture in service recovery (Yani-de-Soriano et al., 2019); for instance, the salesmen’s front-line-interaction culture in innovativeness within the ambits of restaurant services (Al-Mohammad et al., 2014). The eighth topic (fashion, shopping and consumption) explained the fashion consumption of neo-tribes, using the theory of reasoned action (Aung & Sha, 2016), recreational shopping through enjoyment (Bäckström, 2011) and cultural enjoyability of young with respect to popular appeals (Holbrook, 2005).

The ninth topic (customer culture and retail) examined the role of national culture in understanding grocery retailers’ loyalty (De Silva Kanakaratne et al., 2020), along with the interplay among culture, retail promotions and consumer commitment towards malls (Khare et al., 2019). The tenth topic (consumer attitude and products) included consumer acculturation for fashion products and their tendency (Das & Jebarajakirthy, 2020), along with acculturation attitudes for food consumption and entertainment products (Kizgin et al., 2018), besides implicit consumption expressions of country-based consumption resistance (Russell et al., 2011). The eleventh topic (culture and branding) captured the co-creation of cultural norms that helps to create national branding (Li et al., 2020), and a visual culture for corporate branding (Schroeder, 2017). The twelfth topic (Chinese values and culture) identified the consumer xenocentric behaviour that leads to bias against foreign brands, especially in the context of the Chinese market (Mueller et al., 2016), market mavens as Chinese ethnic identity (Cleveland & Bartikowski, 2018; refer Figure 6).

The enhancement in STM over LDA allows for exploring the impact of document-level covariates on topic proportions in the document corpus (Dwivedi et al., 2023). This feature helps in modelling the shifted foci of each discipline, along with its evolution as per research themes (Kraus et al., 2023). As each research article has a publication year as a metadata-based variable, STM can highlight the variation in the topic proportions per year. Hence, within the document text corpus, the effect of the metadata-based covariate (such as publication year) can be predicted and plotted to show how the research topics vary over time. The covariate effect estimation on the topic prevalence for research articles on culture in marketing published during 1990–2020 is presented in Figure 7. The trend chart shows dotted lines, which characterise the 95% confidence interval, suggesting thereby diverse progression of topic prevalence over the years. Considering this, it is evident that Topic 2: ‘Consumer culture theory’, Topic 4: ‘Food consumption and consumption culture’, Topic 6: ‘Global consumer culture’ and Topic 11: ‘Culture and branding’ are on a rising trend, explaining the growing interest of researchers in these themes thereof. Conversely, Topic 7: ‘Customer service’, Topic 10: ‘Consumer attitude and product’, Topic 9: ‘Consumer culture and retail’ and Topic 12: ‘Chinese culture and values’ received declining attention from researchers.

Figure 7.

Covariate Effect Estimation of the Topic Prevalence over Publication Years.

Discussion and Implications

General Discussion

This study offered an overview of research on culture in marketing by presenting an evolution of the field. The most frequent keywords used include ‘culture’, ‘national cultures’, ‘consumer behaviour’, ‘consumer culture’ and ‘international marketing’, suggesting that international marketing received the top-most attention as a key context. As per keyword co-occurrence analysis, ‘culture’, ‘national culture’, ‘consumer culture’ and ‘consumer behavior’ have been the most co-occurring keywords. This analysis strongly links cultural studies with domains within marketing, such as consumer behaviour and national consumer culture. Using the keyword analysis, this study reveals the most influential themes in the chosen domain, presented as clusters, reflecting thereby schools of thought relating to culture in the marketing discipline/domain. This input could help interested researchers in the future to contemplate studies on culture in marketing.

Topic modelling using STM revealed 12 key research topics from the documents corpus exploring culture’s role in marketing. Using STM, it is possible to uncover the hidden semantic association of articles and the latent topics from the document corpus. Of these, the following six have been the most promising themes for further research: Topic 2: ‘Consumer culture theory’, Topic 4: ‘Food consumption and consumer culture’, Topic 6: ‘Global consumer culture’, Topic 8: ‘Fashion, shopping and consumption’, Topic 9: ‘Customer culture and retail’ and Topic 11: ‘Culture and branding’. Researching any of these sub-domains would prove more beneficial, and, therefore, they should be prioritised. Methodologically, very few marketing studies have used STM for temporal thematic analysis (Sharma et al., 2021). The current study would also help potential marketing researchers better understand using an advanced topic modelling technique such as STM to discover common research themes and identify their temporal trends.

Implications for Future Research

Through the systematic review using text analytics-based content analysis of extant literature, we checked for the presence of themes with high research potential. Further research needs to be done to develop a robust overarching framework with high explanatory power. For instance, literature signalled an overdose of theories such as Hofstede’s framework (Hofstede & Bond, 1988), Schwartz’s values (Schwartz & Sagiv, 1995), consumer culture theory for culture distance, and transactional cost economies for internationalisation (Srivastava et al., 2020). However, these studies genuinely lack the application of the widely accepted theoretical models in culture research in marketing. Existing empirical studies used cross-sectional data for testing theories and models. However, the cultural influence on marketing requires a longer time to exactly gauge its impact. Therefore, data unavailability for year-on-year assessment weakens research in the domain of culture in marketing. A need, therefore, exists to develop a holistic database of various country cultures that records year-on-year progress, which would help research prosper at the global level.

The recent influence of globalisation on culture effectively underpins the change of perspective of the interpenetration of two axial principles of ‘globalism’ and ‘localism’ (Tomlinson, 1999), which both collides and reconciles consumers. Studies in the future should, therefore, focus more on the interplay among both micro- and macro-level constructs (more hybridisation), which possibly would go on to explain cultural identification and, thus, adaptation more holistically. For instance, Steenkamp (2019) recommended the fusion of global consumer culture, and local consumer culture at individual and national levels correlates with understanding the positioning of consumer culture. Our STM results revealed the formation of 12 topics that highlight the ‘culture’ aspect in research in retailing, fashion, branding, advertising and services. However, the marketing domain at large has included other sub-domains, such as supply chain, sales and customer relationship management, product management, digital marketing and social marketing. Therefore, it may possibly be affirmed that research on culture does lead to implications in other domains, which offer sizeable insights that may help researchers/scholars in the future to focus their efforts.

Extant research on culture, as evidenced in the reviewed literature, has mostly been qualitative in scope, thus descriptively rich, but it does face criticisms when there are attempts to generalise. International marketers, therefore, need quantification of key aspects of consumer culture, which would help in establishing higher validity in cross-national generalisations and testing boundary conditions (Steenkamp, 2019). For instance, some of the key elements of consumer culture theory (the most widely used theory as per our STM result) could be standardised using the IRT model (Steenkamp, 2001), which offers uniform applicability across developing and emerging economies with an enhanced understanding of both consumers and consumption.

Avenues for Future Research

Despite having rich empirical work in this domain, there are some research gaps that future researchers may aim to fill. Past researchers have developed a few theoretical models that studied the role of culture in marketing; for instance, they include the likes of Capece and Di Pillo (2019) and Moruzzi and Sirieix (2015). These studies have attempted to address conceptualisation, using Hofstede and Hall’s process theorisation, reward-pursuit loyalty, service-dominant logic, the culture of intoxication, bottom-of-pyramid consumers, socialisation and sustainability. However, comprehensive studies that address culture in the marketing landscape specifically are needed.

Furthermore, as stated earlier, existing studies have empirically validated the frameworks that integrate approaches for understanding culture with new theoretical dimensions/constructs. Studies with a focus on theory development, using viewpoints derived from new product design and HRM practices, seem to have been inadequate. Therefore, new cross-domain research opportunities need to be explored in an attempt to improve the larger efficiency of the domain studied (Ford et al., 2023; Park & Stepchenkova, 2023; Srivastava et al., 2020). Furthermore, most of the studies that have researched culture in the marketing domain have used databases from different sectors and have thereby generalised the impact across sectors comprising industries. It is likely that varied industry characteristics may have affected generalisation and have limited the robustness of the results. Thus, there’s certainly a need for cross-sector comparison that effectively addresses sectoral diversity, increasing empirical validation of data thereof. Further, we understand integrating the fragmented knowledge related to the vast field of culture and consumer marketing is a herculean task. However, we have tried our best to provide a bird’s eye view of the knowledge using machine learning-based text analytics methods. In our current and future works, we have already started exploring the impact of culture on consumer marketing for specific geographic areas such as China (Guanxi), India (Vedic Hinduism), Japan (Matsuri) and the United States (the ‘melting pot’ of cultures), etc., to name a few.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.

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