The Cultural Evolution Of Marketing

The definition of Marketing has been expanding with profound researches. The early definition was exchanging of material for the market. Today it means the communication of lifestyle. It is clear that Marketing Theory develops with "culture". Indeed, under Symbol Value and Consumer Culture theories, consumer behavior is a kind of cultural behavior, and consequently, marketing is actually cultural marketing. The paper started from the Culture Theory and inspected the cultural factors in the development of Marketing Theory. Then it explained cultural marketing on the base of Symbol Value and other theories. This paper was to discover the mystery - culture, behind marketing from the Marketing Cases of the United States and Japan. It is found that marketing and marketing systems of two countries respectively reflected different cultural background and values. In turn, the culture affected the marketing practices and development. Therefore, although no one has clearly pointed out, the marketing practices of the United States and Japan are indeed a kind of cultural marketing. In addition, all successful marketing is cultural marketing. The concept of cultural marketing includes not only transmission of culture but also integration and the re-creation of culture. Chinese enterprises have been copying American Marketing Ttheory for a long time, but they have little effect. Because there is no integration into their own culture and there is no Chinese cultural characteristics. The success of the United States and Japan stated that only the unique cultural character is the weapon for winning.The writing purpose of this paper will reach if Chinese enterprises can learn from the cases and establish a cultural marketing strategy with Chinese characteristics. In fact, the researches of Culture Theory and Marketing Theory have a long history. However, although there are many people devoted to analyze the cultural factors in marketing, very few people have pointed out the internal linkages between culture and marketing. The innovation of this paper is to give out a definition of cultural marketing and to reveal the essence of marketing - cultural marketing. Moreover, many people used the United States and Japan cases to compare the surface features of two marketing but with no deeper discovering. This paper will not only compare the marketing features, but also reveals the underlying causes - culture.