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3.2 Segmentation, Targeting and Positioning 8
3.3 Marketing Strategies 11
4 Cultural Factors Affecting Marketing Strategies 13
4.1Cultural Factors Affecting Product Strategy 13
4.2 Cultural Factors Affecting PriceStrategy 15
4.3 Cultural FactorsAfecting Place Srategy 16
4.4 Cultural FactorsAffectingPromotionStrategy 18
5 Conclusion 20
Bibliography 21
1 Introduction
With the economic globalization, people from different countries and different cultural backgrounds communicate with each other much more frequently than ever before. Under this circumstance, more and more companies and enterprises start to develop their international markets, trying to find more chances there. For the multinational enterprises, in order to meet their goals smoothly, they have to take the cultural factors into consideration in the target marketing places. As the researches conducted by many scholars, cultural factors are key ones in influencing the international marketing strategies. Therefore the international marketing practitioners should take these factors into their considerations when it comes to establish the international marketing strategies. A good understanding of culture differences is a must for markers to succeed in the global competitions, when they are conducting international marketing.
As to the definition of culture, many people want to give a universally accepted answer, but it is hard to define “culture” exactly. We can find various definitions of Culture from different aspects as follows: “Culture is a way of life of a group of people--the behaviors, beliefs, values, and symbols that they accept, generally without thinking about them, and that are passed along by communication and imitation from one generation to the next. Culture is symbolic communication. Some of its symbols include a group's skills, knowledge, attitudes, values, and motives. The meanings of the symbols are learned and deliberately perpetuated in a society through its institutions. “Culture consists of patterns, explicit and implicit, and for behavior acquired and transmitted by symbols, constituting the distinctive achievement of human groups, including their embodiments in artifacts; the essential core of culture consists of traditional ideas and especially their attached values; culture systems may, on the one hand, be considered as products of action, on the other hand, as conditioning influences upon further action” (William B, 2007:3).
The theory of Marketing was firstly put forward at the early 20th century by American specialists. Then the theory of “four Ps” for marketing strategies, where the four Ps stand for product, price, place and promotion. “Product” refers to the product-related elements including both goods and services. “Price” is, to much extent, influenced by economic situations, which is the most important element of the four. “Place” and “promotion” are two elements concerning the delivery system. The four Ps strategies are designed to influence consumer decision making and lead to profitable exchanges. Each element of the marketing mix (product, price, promotion, and place) can affect consumers in various ways.
This paper mainly analyzes the role that cultural factors play in international marketing. It is obvious that the differences between different cultures may cause misunderstandings and problems in cross-cultural marketing. Therefore, this paper will resort to McCarthy and Yuan Qi’s Marketing Theory as the theoretical basis to make an analysis about how cultural factors affect international marketing.