It is largely for marketing reasons that most multinationals seek to play down their home base. Thus Japanese companies in the US seek to present themselves as American (watch a US television advert for Toyota). BMW has kept the Rover brand name here, despite its dubious residual value. Shell (arguably the most successful cross-national enterprise) is thought of as American in the US, British here and Dutch in the Netherlands. Only where there is a strong cultural identity incorporated into the product, as in McDonald’s hamburgers, is the nationality of the home base emphasised.

If you are Microsoft and you have a global monopoly it does not matter much, but for the rest the rule is that when exporting to the world you lose more friends than you gain by stressing your origins.
But the relationship between national culture and multinational companies is much deeper than how to gain a marketing edge. Marketing matters, but management matters much more.Until recently, decisions on management style have been simple. The core management style is set by head office and while it might be modified a bit to fit into local cultures, if you want to get on you wear the company uniform – whatever that might be. While the main asset of a corporation was the knowledge of how to make a product or develop a process, that worked adequately well. But two things have happened which have rendered the old model redundant.First, human assets have become a more important element in corporate success.

As a result the top-down imposed management culture becomes more difficult to sustain. You can impose an external culture but you risk losing the human capital you thought you had bought. But if you don’t impose elements of discipline from HQ, the people are liable to run the show for their own benefit rather than that of the distant shareholders. The German purchases of British merchant banks and the Japanese purchases of Hollywood studios demonstrate the pitfalls of such adventures.Second, there has been a clutch of mergers where it is not clear, initially at least, which partner will be the dominant one Usually, after a while, it does become pretty clear.