Abstract:

Over the years much has been written about cultural sensitivity in marketing. As manufacturers began offering products and services to the worldwide community, marketers struggled with building a single global brand while localizing their messages where appropriate. These early global marketing efforts were not without mistakes. We don't need to review the examples of car brands in Mexico or the use of polar bears at Christmas in Sao Paulo, but, suffice to say, both marketing and marketing communication professionals have learned to sell to a single global market while localizing messages when appropriate.As marketers began tackling the issues of global branding, the marketing research industry was pressed to begin providing global marketing intelligence. Similar to our marketing counterparts, we as an industry made mistakes in trying to understand the drivers of the global markets. The advent of online research has provided a new set of challenges. The purpose of this paper is to begin identifying some of these challenges and share our experiences in conducting global online research.