Article by: Muhammad Akram

Cultural influence on International Marketing Communication

The literature on marketing communication stresses that for any business to successfully operate either domestically or internationally communication is one of the most important functions to master. A firm’s profitability is in part determined by its marketing communication strategies and skills. Sometime the  negligence by top managers for internationally operating companies about the cultural differences the significance that invisible barriers cultural differences create in marketing communication. Cultural factors play an important role, functioning as invisible barriers (Tian and Borges, 2011).

Culture greatly influence the international marketing. It is very important for the marketing team to study about the local culture in-depth before offering a product. The purpose of every international marketing communication is to promote a product into different cultures in a way that customers are attracted to the product and they are influenced enough to buy it. There are several examples that due to improper consideration of the culture even bigger companies successfully operating in different countries fail in some of the countries. For example Disney land is a name of success in the amusement park business around the globe. They have made great profits and success in USA, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Japan but when they started their journey in France they faced a tremendous problem and had to bear billions of dollars loss. Disney management started a study and found out that the marketing communication strategy adopted by the American managers hurt the French people and message was not received as it was intended to be. As a result people decided not to be in the Paris Disney Park. Similarly out of every ten US managers eight have to replace from Saudi Arabia within three months of their joining as they fail to cope and understand the Saudi culture and norms.

There are a number of key cultural elements that international marketers need to take into consideration when designing products advertisement, developing promotions and implementing distribution systems in foreign markets. These elements include values, beliefs, thought processes, symbols, traditions, religion and language. The cultural aspects influence international marketing strategy from several angels. It needs careful attention from the marketing people in marketing communication plan, marketing design and marketing plans implementation phase. It is emphasized in the literature that determining the differences in the cultural values should guide the formulation of international marketing communication strategies (Munson and McIntyre, 1979).

The marketing mix strategy of Product, Price, Place and Promotion (4 P’s) varies significantly across the cultures. Even for the homogeneous products with similar price strategy need a different promotion strategy to be placed effectively in different cultures. It is not possible to adopt similar marketing communication strategy in the global market to gain global success.  

The above paragraphs show the importance of the cultural influences on marketing communication strategy. In the following paragraphs I will discuss some points to ponder for international marketing communication strategy in planning, designing and implementation and how it has been adopted by the successful multinationals in global market.

 

Marketing Communication Plan

A good marketing communications plan requires you to do substantial research. The planners need to have an in-depth understanding of target audiences and the processes involved in buying, selling, and communicating.  Once the required knowledge is achieved by the planners, they can analyze their minimum targets they want to achieve from the marketing activities. They also need to plan the best ways to communicate their message to audience. The ways of communication and the receivers decoding of these messages vary across the cultures. Therefore, it is important to keep the cultural values in mind while laying down the integrated communication plan. Ideally, the marketing plan should outline the communications process step by step for each and every market with specialists feedback about the possible outcome of perceived messages. The marketing plan should not only identify the elements of the culture but also how they affect the marketing practices in the culture.

Design & Implementation

International marketing communication is communication that crosses national boundaries for business purposes. Ferraro (2006) identified that it is some time hard to communicate in proper way amongst the people from same cultures, therefore, communication between people from different cultures from the point of view of language, values, customs, and ways of thinking, will be far more difficult and it is almost impossible to avoid the possibility of miscommunication. Tian and Broges (2011) are of view that “problems in marketing communication conducted cross-culturally often arise when participants from one culture are unable to understand culturally determined differences in communication practices, traditions, and thought-processing in another cultural context.”

The marketing communication gurus stress upon the different advertising contents for the different cultures.  International advertising research has confirmed differences in advertising content between countries. It is observed that advertisements are significantly affected by the individual countries’ social systems, values, norms and characteristics of the local culture (Emery and Tian, 2003).

 

Therefore understanding the importance of cultural values in advertising has great practical value in marketing communication. McCracken (1987) believes that if the business ignore the ‘embedded cultural meaning’ in their advertisements it could result into a misinterpretation of the intended message. This misinterpretation will lead to a miscommunication which may become the main reason for the business to fail in the international market.   

Lin et al. (2012) analyzed the video advertisements from four successful multinational companies (i.e. IKEA, Coca Cola, Mercedes–Benz, Johnson & Johnson) in two different cultures (i.e. USA and China) and found that the United States commercials used hard sell appeals, displayed individualistic values, and exhibited low context culture values, whereas Chinese commercials relied more on soft sell appeals, displayed collectivistic values, and exhibited high context culture values.

Figure 1: Coca Cola's different labels for Asian Countries.

The above example clearly indicate that to be successful in cross cultural marketing communication, not only the marketing communication planning is required to be done in accordance with the cultural values but also the message designing and the way it is transmitted to audience is important.

 Conclusion

In this article I have tried to capture the glimpses of researchers findings about the influences of culture on international marketing communication. It is widely observed that culture largely influence the marketing communication. The awareness of cultural norms while planning, designing and implementing international marketing communication is very important for the marketing professionals. If the cultural aspects are well covered there are high chances for a marketing communication plan to be successful in the target market. That is why the cultural influences have forced even to the companies like Coca Cola and McDonalds to implement different marketing plans and strategies for their relatively  homogeneous products across the globe. They are somehow enforced not only to design different advertisements and labels but also different way of communicating their messages in different cultures.

Therefore, we can conclude that marketing planners have to be very careful that they don’t underestimate the cultural impacts on the buying behavior of the customer. They need to develop an understanding, acceptance and tolerance of the cultural aspects of the market in order to develop effective marketing communication strategy for the company which should give them the competitive advantage to achieve the goals effectively. Failure to understand the cultural aspects may lead to the failure of whole campaign and exercise. If this would happen it may cause a significant damage to company's image for the future in the market. 

 

References

Emery, C. R. & Tian, R. G. (2003). The Effect of Cultural Differences on the Effectiveness of Advertising Appeals: A Comparison between China and the US. Transformations in Business and Economics, 2.1 (3), 48-59.

Ferraro, G. P. (2006). The Cultural Dimension of International Business, (5th ed.) NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall.

Lin, Y., Koroglu, D., Olson, L. (2012).  The Influence Of Cultural Values In Advertising: Examples From China And The United States. International Conference on Communication, Media, Technology and Design, Istanbul–Turkey, 435–441.

McCracken, G. (1987). Advertising: Meaning or Information? In M. Wallendorf and P.F. Anderson (Eds.), Advances in Consumer Research XIV. Provo, UT: Association for Consumer Research, 121-124.

Munson, J. M. & McIntyre, S. H. (1979). Developing Practical Procedures for the Measurement of Personal Values in Cross-Cultural Marketing. Journal of Marketing Research, 15, 48.

Tian, K., Borges, L. (2011). Cross-Cultural Issues in Marketing Communications: An Anthropological Perspective of International Business. International Journal of China Marketing, 2(1), 110–126.