Agnes Montgomery is the director of marketing for Ideal Plastics, Inc. Ideal has distributors all over the world. Last year, Agnes developed a system for measuring the distributors' satisfaction levels with Ideal on 20 different dimensions. Each dimension of company service, such as "Return Policy" and "Ease of Placing an Order," was evaluated by the distributors on a semantic differential scale ranging from "Very Satisfied" to "Very Dissatisfied." Now, several months after implementing the system, Agnes has data to analyze. She noticed that the Asian countries seemed to have different means from the countries in the UK, United States, and Western Europe. Agnes looked carefully at the actual scores and saw that Asian distributors seemed to have much stronger feelings, either positively or negatively. Agnes should:
A) immediately conduct some exploratory research within the Asian division to determine why the mean scores are so different.
B) take aggressive action in the Asian division by changing the company's procedures on all the service dimensions having lower means than the other divisions.
C) view the results between countries with major cultural differences cautiously because different cultural influences affect how individuals respond to scales.
D) view the results among countries with similar cultures cautiously because differences in means on service dimensions are likely due to reference group influences instead of real differences in company performance.
E) all of the above
Answer: C) view the results between countries with major cultural differences cautiously because different cultural influences affect how individuals respond to scales.