The Influence of Culture on Personal Selling Interactions
Résumé
Changing economic conditions drive firms to identify those activities that can be conducted with a global perspective, leaving other activities, such as personal selling, to local decision makers. However, some personal selling methods are successfully marketed on a worldwide basis with very little local adaptation. The choice between these centralized or local systems may be influenced by cultural factors, which are likely to be overlooked by foreign managers. The objective of this paper is to identify which aspects of personal selling interactions are influenced by culture and to propose a conceptual framework explaining the relationships between cultural factors and the selling process.