The Moderating Role of National Culture on the Effectiveness of Global Standardised Marketing Campaigns in Sub-Saharan Africa: Evidence from Nigeria

This study investigates the moderating role of national culture on the effectiveness of globally standardised marketing campaigns in sub-Saharan Africa, using Nigeria as the primary empirical context, and develops an original cultural moderation framework for global marketing standardisation decisions. The standardisation versus adaptation debate has occupied international marketing scholarship for decades, yet empirical evidence specifically addressing the cultural boundary conditions of standardisation effectiveness in sub-Saharan African markets remains scant. Nigeria, with its multi-ethnic diversity, Afrocentric cultural identity movements, and rapidly growing consumer market, presents an ideal setting for investigating cultural moderators of global campaign effectiveness. Grounded in Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, the cultural distance literature, and the global marketing standardisation-adaptation framework, the study constructs an original model proposing that Afrocentric consumer identity, power distance orientation, and uncertainty avoidance collectively moderate the effectiveness of standardised versus culturally adapted campaign stimuli across cognitive, affective, and conative response dimensions. A 3x2 factorial experimental design exposes 540 Nigerian consumers to standardised versus progressively localised campaign executions across three global brand categories. MANOVA, interaction analysis, and mediation testing evaluate cultural moderation effects. The study delivers original theoretical contributions to the global marketing standardisation literature by specifying cultural moderation mechanisms with high specificity in an African market context. Keywords: global marketing, standardisation, national culture, Afrocentric identity, sub-Saharan Africa