FINAL QUESTIONNAIRE DESIGNS

Our questionnaires, being our core instruments, have been and are continually being refined. Multiple choice questions were constructed describing alternate courses of action to respond to dilemmas. The different combinations of answers that can be selected are intended to probe constructs such as:

• whether marketers focus on trying to push their own established products in different markets with corresponding different cultures and thus reject attempts at reconciliation;

• whether they tend to abandon their attempts to market their established products or services and seek new replacement products and services appropriate to the new markets that fit the culture of these new markets. This is the "when in Rome..." approach (lose-win);

• whether marketers seek a compromise position (lose-lose);

• whether marketers develop marketing plans that reconcile the differences between the established markets and new markets that have different cultures.

The value systems underlying each dilemma that is posed owe their origin to one of the seven dimensions of Trompenaars model of cross culture. Thus the question can be used to simultaneously identify both their value orientation (e.g., preferences for rules or exceptions, individualism or communitarianism) and their propensity to reconcile.

Thus the total spectrum of dilemma questions provides gives data that is combined in different combinations to a series of scales :

• scores on each cross-cultural dimension (i.e. a full cross-cultural profile); and

• for each dimension, scores on the propensity to:

  • compromise,

  • reject reconciliation,

  • the degree of seeking reconciliation from one's own cultural orientation first and then accommodating the alternate,

  • the degree of seeking reconciliation from the alternate cultural orientation first and then accommodating one's own,

and thereby

• a total reconciliation score per dimension,

and, in summary

• a set of total scores for reconciliation across all cultural dimensions (clockwise and anti-clockwise spirals ), rejection and compromise.

The accumulation of the evidence is ongoing. Recently an area of our website (www.cultureforbusiness.com) open to free access that invites online responses to versions of our models has resulted in the number of valid cases increasing exponentially.