International marketing in an enlarged European Union: Some insights into cultural heterogeneity in Central Europe*

Journal for East European Management Studies, 2008 by Skinner, Heather, Kubacki, Krzysztof, Moss, Gloria, Chelly, David

Respondents were asked to rank the extent to which they agreed/disagreed that each determinant contributed to their feeling of national identity on a 7-point Likert scale. As the issue of self-concept of individual consumers may also be linked to the self-concept of individual citizens within the member-states of the European Union, the final part of the questionnaire replicated the European Commission survey into perceptions of self and national identity in member states.

The authors conducted the survey in the first months of 2005, following pretesting with a UK sample of 224 students. Data was collected using questionnaires administered to independent samples drawn from level 1, 2 and 3 undergraduate business students in the Czech Republic, Hungary and Poland. The respondents were surveyed in their countries of origin, using questionnaires translated into their national languages. The research team have various native skills in the languages used and so translated the paper from English into their respective native tongues, although back translation was not used, and also travelled to the relevant country to deliver the questionnaire in their own native tongue. Therefore, for example, a native Pole translated the paper into Polish, and personally travelled to Poland to administer the survey in Polish, with Polish respondents, on a Polish university campus.

The study employed the strategy of matched samples (Hofstede 1991), which "may be expected to yield accurate estimates of the differences between the countries studied", minimising potential differences between respondents, other than nationality (Kolman et al. 2003). Using university students as participants is a popular sampling method in cross-country and cross-cultural studies because of their reported superiority to random samples for establishing equivalence (Dant/Barnes 1988).

They were also characterised in earlier studies as a homogenous group easily accessible to the researcher (Calder et al. 1981). Moreover, the use of a student sample, while not representative of the population, would research the views of people in these nations who are both educated and young, reflecting core target segments for many international marketers, at a time when, according to Bechhofer et al. (1999:516) the search for a national identity in postmodern society "has become fashionable because people are not sure who they are".

841 usable questionnaires were returned. The sample consisted of 383 respondents from Poland (45.5%), 240 from Hungary (28.5%) and 218 from the Czech Republic (26%). The demographic profile of the respondents is found in Table 1. Overall there was an unequal gender distribution with more female (69.9%) than male respondents (30.1%) in the sample; however, the gender distribution in each national sample was similar. 2 out of the 3 countries reported an average age of 21 years, with Hungary showing a relatively younger sample averaging 20 years of age. Only respondents who classified themselves as nationals of the nation in question were included in the study. All respondents were young people aged between 18 and 24, studying business subjects at degree level. This data was subjected to a frequency analysis in SPSS. The respondents' profiles, means and standard deviations for the total sample as well as the three national subsamples are presented in Tables 1 and 2: