A Cross-National Comparison of Brand Perceptions of Global Franchise Chains in the BRICS

Abstract

This study compares consumers’ brand perceptions across the five BRICS countries. We executed a cross-national comparison of how two United States-based global franchise brands in the fast-food restaurant industry (i.e., McDonald's and Burger King) are perceived by local consumers in a host market. The cultural distance index, drawn from Hofstede's cultural typology, is used to examine cultural influences on the development of brand perceptions. Our findings confirm that the smaller the cultural distance between a host market and the United States the stronger the brand perceptions of the two iconic United States brands. In particular, South African and Indian consumers, where the cultural distance indexes are smaller compared with the United States, perceived McDonald's more positively compared with consumers in Brazil, Russia, and China. Our comparative study demonstrates that generalizations drawn from single-country studies might lead to erroneous conclusions about global marketing strategies such as standardization versus localization.