Role of culture in international marketing

In this paper, I am trying to present role of culture in marketing in India. How does culture influences the marketing strategic decision of company.Culture is an extremely important consideration for the international market. The consumer behavior is greatly influenced by culture, which varies widely among the countries. Most Indian find it difficult to understand how people in the west eat cows which gives milk and is considered as an integral part of the farming system. Similarly, Korean's and some other East Asian countries love for foods such as blood worm, soup, snake soup, and dog meat is not easy to rationalize for the people of other culture. Culture is shared among member of group, organization or society and passed from one generation to the other. Culture is passed on the human capacity to symbolize. Culture consists of several constituents interrelated with one another in a complex manner affecting a person's behavior including consumer behaviour. Culture influences how a group of people lives. Therefore culture permits people's decision making and buying behavior. How they shop, what they buy, where they buy and how they buy are influenced. The international marketer must learn and understand the foreign culture for developing most successful marketing strategy.