Culture is Pervasive in All Marketing Activities

Coca Cola Website designed for Italian customers reflecting colorful advertisement and visual media (reflection to the outward personality of Italian customer)

Coca Cola Website designed for Japanese customer base. Tidier, fonts and layout more restricted. Clean and simple pictures. "Cute mascot" is present on website as a Japanese custom.

(1) The manner in which people satisfy their needs and wants are functions of their culture and it affects every part of our lives. I agree that culture is as pervasive as competition in international marketing and not understanding cultural differences may lead to ineffectiveness or failure of marketing activities. For example if we have a clear vision of cultural patterns (Muslim countries do not eat pork), we can position our product and design our advertisement more successfully (avoid any pork content in a product and references to pigs in advertisement).

As an extreme example let’s take the Internet that is perceived to eliminate cultural differences and promote culture free products. If we look at the cross-cultural marketing and advertising research findings, we will quickly see that culture has broad influence even on this new marketing medium. Culture specific communication preferences and hard factors like political, economical and technical preferences have influence on Internet.

For example a study on the use of internet in South Korea reveals that (2) the family functions (are) as just such a mediating factor and wields a significant influence on the course of diffusion in the case of South Korean society, where communalism takes precedence over individualism. As a result, the decision to use the Internet is likely to be influenced by behavioral pressures from social groups such as the family rather than by spontaneous behavior based on calculation of individual costs and benefits. Another study (3) to determine if American and Mexican Web pages differed in their depiction of cultural values, revealed that since USA has highest individualism-collectivism score while Mexico ranks lower and is more collectivist in orientation (Hofstede, 1980), local Mexican Web pages will reflect a higher level of collectivism than the Mexican Web pages of American companies.

Same study suggested and proved that countries like Greece, Japan, and Mexico rank high on uncertainty avoidance, and their people are relatively more risk averse, need security, and look for direction than United States and therefore Mexican Web pages will reflect a higher level of uncertainty avoidance than American Web pages.

These studies goes to prove that (4) “in spite of their ostensible universality and important role as engines of globalization, the Internet and its Web neither eliminate cultural differences nor are they culture-free products” and let alone direct marketing, even to e-market a product over international borders (using internet), companies should look out for cultural cues and culture related design criteria like content appeal, layout, length of pages and multimedia presentation.

(1) Cateora, International Marketing, Chapter 4 Introduction
(2) Rhee, K. Y., & Kim, W. B. (2004). The adoption and use of the Internet in South Korea. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication, 9 http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue4/rhee.html
(3) Singh, N., & Baack, D.W. (2004). Web site adaptation: A cross-cultural comparison of U.S. and Mexican web sites. Journal of Computer Mediated Communication,9
http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol9/issue4/singh_baack.html
(4) Hermeking, M. (2005). Culture and Internet consumption: Contributions from cross-cultural marketing and advertising research. Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 11(1), article 10. http://jcmc.indiana.edu/vol11/issue1/hermeking.html