International Marketing: The Importance Of Intercultural Marketing

Introduction Products, services… are the heart of the company which tries its best to sell them and make lots of profit. In order to succeed on the market, firms must be very careful how they promote their goods. Here comes advertising, who plays a huge role in persuading the audience (readers, viewers or listeners) to buy the products/ services. Therefore firms have to study the culture, people to whom they want to sale so that they will know how to get into the persons mind and hearts. For a company that goes international this aspect can be very delicate since requires research, learning and readapting advertising to a new environment. Firms are used with their own culture, characteristics, ways to sale the product but when you change the

It’s not only a matter of having a good product, but today, we also talk about the way the product is presented to the consumer which will determine whether or not the consumer will buy the product or service. “Cultural communications are deeper and more complex than spoken or written messages. The essence of effective cross-cultural communication has more to do with releasing the right responses than with sending the “right” messages” (Hall & Hall 1990, p. 4). When a company is choosing its strategy for venturing into a new market it has to know that is important to be aware of the receiving

Since the customers are those who set the “rules” when it comes to advertising, companies have to be aware of the characteristics of the culture in which they want to sell their products in order to know how to develop a good advert or to readapt the existent one to the new culture. Regarding to this aspect, we can talk about standardized or differentiated advertising. Standardization is supported by the idea of globalization and that the differences between countries are superficial and people from all over the world should have the desire to buy the same product for the same reasons even though they come from different cultures. Standardization of advertising would first occur in countries that use the same language and have a similar level of economic development (Stephan Dahl, 2004). For some products, standardization would be the best option, for example products that have a correlation between a specific country’s reputation in a particular field and positive associations e.g. chocolate from Belgium- associated with high quality. As well, products that have a visual appeal are very suitable for standardization (Pickton & Broderick 2005, p. 176-179). Even though a product might be suitable for more countries, the consumer’s needs, traditions and usage of the product or service may differ