The Effects of Adaptation, Commitment, and Trust in Cross-Cultural Marketing Relationships

The spread of global business presents distinct challenges for those wishing to develop marketing relationships. Key elements of successful marketing relationships have been explored in the literature and are well understood (Morgan and Hunt, 1994; Walters, Peters, and Dess, 1994; Anderson and Narus, 1990). This paper expands the understanding of cross-cultural marketing relationships in three ways. It does so first by empirically testing a model of commitment and trust in an international context. Then the paper presents findings that suggest that cultural adaptation by the focal firm has a significant effect on commitment. We hypothesize that a firm\u27s adaptation to its partner’s culture significantly effects cooperation in cross-cultural marketing relationships and test the hypotheses by taking a structural equations approach. This paper finds that efforts made by the firm to adapt to the partner\u27s culture improve relationship performance and that higher levels of Trust lead to higher levels of Commitment and that higher levels of both Trust and Commitment lead to greater Cooperation