Global Individulaism

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Introduction Should the international firm treat the world as one market place approached with standardized marketing or should local markets be treated differently? The issue is not a new one but it had become increasingly polarized in the academic and business press.

The years that follow will see increasing complexity through the interaction of intensified globalization and moves towards a fragmented society. In this sense, the globalization process leads to the acceptance of the view that ?the world becomes a single place?, capable of generating and sustaining various images of the world is or should be. From this perspective, a global culture does not point to homogeneity, nor to a common culture, but rather it can be argued that, in the increased sense that we all share the same planet and are daily involved in an increasing range of multinational contacts with others, it could offer a better chance of tolerance and consequently the prospect of unity through this diversity.

As an apparent contradiction to this trend towards globalization, one can find opposing postmodernist views, that many markets are on the contrary fragmenting into divergent segments and short-lived niches, even into groups of specific individuals.

However these two trends (local to global, mass to individual), far from being contradictory opposites, can be seen as stemming from the same historical development towards a ?global culture?.

So, if we attempt to conceptualize a new marketing for today, we must take into account both the process of globalizing cultural diversity and the postmodern trend towards fragmentation and individualism (axes 1 and 2, in Figure 1). As a result, the globalization dispute in marketing must avoid ?globalization myopia? and incorporate contributions both fro the fields of global marketing and one-to-one marketing.

Axis 1 : From Local to Global Recent decades have witnessed intensified movement...