In a global setting, freedom can take on many dimensions. Privileges and obligations that are near and dear to some may well be cheap and easily disposed of by others. The views of one society may differ from views held in other regions of the world. Such differences then account for misunderstandings, surprises, and long-term conflicts.
There are two value dimensions at work here, both of them highly relevant to global marketing.
One may be defined as the freedom and values of a market economy. To make them work, governmental, managerial, and corporate virtue, vision, and veracity are required. Unless the world can believe in the messages and behaviors of institutions and their leaders, it will be difficult to forge a global commitment between those doing the marketing and the ones being marketed to. It is therefore of vital interest to the proponents of freedom and international marketing to ensure that corruption, bribery, lack of transparency, and poor governance are exposed for their negative effects in any setting or society.
A second and even more crucial issue is the value system we use in making choices. There are major differences among what people value around the world. Contrasts include togetherness compared to individuality, cooperation versus competition, modesty next to assertiveness, and self-effacement compared to self-actualization. Often, global differences in value systems keep us apart and result in spectacularly destructive dissimilarities. What value we place on family, work, leisure time, or progress has a substantial effect on how we see and evaluate each other.
Cultural studies tell us that there are major differences between and even within nations. Global marketing, through its linkages via goods, services, ideas, and communications, can achieve important assimilations of value systems.
It has been claimed that local product offerings help define people and provide identity and that it is the local idiosyncrasies that make people beautiful. Yet, we should remember that values are learned, not genetically implanted. As life’s experiences grow more international and more similar, so do values. Therefore, every time international marketing forges a new linkage in thinking, new progress is made in shaping a greater global commonality in values. It may well be that international marketing’s ability to align global values which makes it easier for countries, companies, and individuals to build bridges between them, may eventually become the field’s greatest gift to the world.
How do freedom and international marketing match with today’s discontent so forcefully expressed by anti-globalists? Many claim that never before in history has there been so much evidence of such strong opposition to globalization and to Americans as harbingers of international marketing.
Perhaps those making such claims are wrong. In looking at other “globalizers” in world history, such as the Vikings, the Mongols, the Tatars, and the Romans, there probably was both intellectual and physical opposition. But protesters were never allowed to become very vocal, or to engage in repeated, large demonstrations or widespread pamphleteering. Because of rather harsh policies towards those who opposed, very few records of resistance are available today.
Today’s news is good. The nations, institutions, and individuals around the world are increasingly accepting freedom as the key foundation of the good life. We are discovering that international marketing, both as a discipline and as an activity, is very closely interwoven with freedom – some even call it essential. It is the freedom Thomas Aquinas saw as the means to human excellence and happiness which international marketing helps us reach. In reciprocal causality, freedom causes and facilitates international marketing, while global marketing is a key support of the cause of freedom. It is a productive symbiosis at work.
This is part of a three part series on Freedom, Marketing, and Poverty (FMP). If you missed the first two installments, look them up here.
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