Commentary on “Co-creating Stakeholder and Brand Identities: A Cross-cultural Consumer Perspective”

This commentary raises awareness for the relevance of other cultural dimensions- besides individualism and collectivism - and alternative approaches to cross-cultural research for exploring cultural variations in stakeholders' co-construction of brand identity and their own identities. The author suggests replacing the value-centered approach to culture by an understanding of culture as something dynamic and unsettled, more than cognitive, disjunctive, and not necessarily bounded to geography. Culture includes other important aspects such as habits, rituals, practices, heroes, language and symbols. Abstract variables fail to capture the rich cultural content of social factors and, as such, are uninformed by and uninformative about concrete social life and the subtleties of local culture. Considering multiple aspects of cultural difference, interactions between these aspects, and the continuous influence of various cultures on each other can provide additional, relevant insights into reciprocal identity co-construction processes between brands and stakeholders.