INTERNATIONAL MARKETING INTRODUCTION ...

INTERNATIONAL MARKETING
INTRODUCTION
This paper takes a look at Culture as a major issue in International Marketing. It critically evaluates the nature of culture and its impact on international marketing plans. A structured approach is used with appropriate models, concepts and frameworks from relevant academic literatures.
The first session of the paper defines culture and how it interlocks with international marketing using models from notable researchers such as Dr. Geert Hofstede , Dr. Fons Trompenaars and the widely used framework from Terpstra and Sarathy. The later was used as the key model in analysing the effect of culture on international marketing because of its simplicity and ease of understanding. Relevant examples were provided to buttress the theoretical argument and debates of these theories and frameworks.
The latter session of this paper looks at how culture affects the 4Ps (place, price, promotion and product) of international marketing. A brief literature review was conducted on these four key elements of marketing before using a case study of Persil in China to exemplify how culture affects these activities of International marketing.
The author did an extensive research and tried as much as possible to enough shed light on this ever sensitive international marketing issue within five thousand words. Alot was learnt during the course of this assignment hence the paper was concluded with the author’s own reflexivity account of the whole exercise.
Culture and its definition
Culture is an extension of what is known of the past. It is a learned behaviour rather than inborn, a characteristic emphasised by oxford English dictionary as “improvement or refinement of the mind, tastes and manners; the condition of being thus trained and refined; the intellectual side of civilisation”. Scholars like Lackmann, Hanson and Lanasa, (1997) defines a people's culture to include their beliefs, rules of behaviour, language, rituals, art, technology, clothing styles, food, religion, and political and economic systems (as cited in Freitag, 2005).
Culture is commonly used as the most convenient word to symbolize what is in effect a pattern, as it pin points the set of social norms and reactions which shapes the society’s behaviour (Solely & Pandya, 2003). A reflexivity measure always comes into play in the evaluation of foreign culture and this shapes marketing prospect. The end results of centuries of habituation in what our domestic culture considers to be acceptable and non-acceptable modes of behaviour shapes our perceptions of foreign market and customer behaviour (Sosik et al ,2002). The most critical issue most organisations experience within its international operations is not rooted in the society but rooted on how it relates to that society (bhagat et al, 2002). As an example, a western marketer going to work in Nigeria; a country where people wake early in the morning ...