How culture affects buyer habits

How Culture and Social Networks influence purchasing habits?
In recent days a huge number of factors such as perceptions, emotions and the environment affect the buying decision of every customer around the world. However, it is only the combination of all of them what builds the final buyer behaviour. Some studies have demonstrated that customers are seeing and receiving lots of symbols andimages every day which can make them change their view about products and services and change their buying habits. In fact, a survey carried out in 2010 affirms that each person receives between 1600 and 3000 publicity banners every day but they only pay attention to the five per cent of all these information. That is why achieving the attention of clients is becoming more and more difficult forfirms due to the fact that customers feel saturated about such a huge volume of information. Due to the complexity and the difficulty of studying this phenomenon as a whole the aim of this assignment is analysing only two main factors that affect customers, these are the culture and social networks. I will try to understand how important they are and what effect they have in the purchasing decisions.Although the role of both of them is very different, the interaction between them on the buyers is constant. In lots of situations, culture and social networks tend to force to people to opposite behaviours, the way through consumers manage these two factors explain a considerable part of why people act in very different ways. While the culture has been built in thousands of years of citizensestablishing standards, nowadays new factors are, in some way, trying to modify the standards habits, one of these is without doubt the social networks. In spite of the fact that culture is embedded in every society, the considerable influence of social networks can change the way consumers think and appreciate products and services. This is the main reason why firms expend huge quantities of moneyand time trying to understand how customers think and how they can change your perception about the environment.
The reason why I have chosen this topic is because, in business schools, it is very common studying how customers are influenced by advertising campaigns and how effective they are but marketing is constantly changing and they have not introduced the matter of social networks yet dueto the fact that it is a very innovative channel. I really want to go deeper on this matter and understanding how firms are using these resources to be nearer to the customer and how these social networks manage all the information they have. I also would like to understand how social networks and culture coexist.
I have divided my assignment in three parts. Firstly, I will analyse how cultureaffects customers. Secondly, I will describe how firms are using social networks in order to persuade customers and to modify their perceptions. Finally, I will contrast both factors and predict the importance of both of them in the near future as a conclusion. In other to support my assignment I have read several articles on the web and I have chosen two which, in my opinion, are the most accurateto white my essay. These articles are: “The role of culture in buyer behaviour” by Ashish Sharma (University Institute of management) and “Does social media affects consumer behaviour?” by Laurens Bianchi.

Culture
The article “The role of culture in buyer behaviour” explains how companies are marketing their products beyond their home countries. In fact, medium and high capitalizationcompanies are extending their operations in the global marketing for increasing their revenues and expand their brand. This is what we know as globalization what has caused a reduction of the differences between different countries due to the fact that the multinationals are spreading the fever of similar variety in most of the nation’s making markets more homogeneous and standardized. The author...