Recently, BankAustria Creditanstalt has successfully developed a strategy to target the upper mainstream market in Austria by using the Sinus-Milieu® approach. The extension of that strategy to the markets in Central and Eastern Europe is currently underway. Centering upon this practical example, this paper describes our specific methodological concept when confronted with international research and the issue of cultural diversity, its application in the case of the BankAustria Creditanstalt, and its application to the post-communist transformation societies in Central and Eastern Europe.
This paper is based on a completed study conducted in 1996 and 1997 in Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia. The general objectives are to identify similarities and differences among the countries and to locate the key dimensions of socio-cultural change. The research focus is on the evolution and differentiation of lifestyles within different social milieus in the four countries. The qualitative methods used are: 100 in-depth face-to-face interviews in each of the four countries, photo documentation of the respondentsâ everyday surroundings and a semiotic analysis of the visual documentation.