impact of culture on marketing

CULTURAL IMPACT ON MARKETING

Most organizations that are consumer-oriented are said to be cultural bound. This to great extent is true because consumers of such products are members of certain cultural groupings and inclinations irrespective of their stages in life (P.P. Ekerete, 2010).

Culture in itself has come to have several meanings and while some basically would describe it in association with self comportment and well behavior, others would describe it in association to traditional beliefs, festivals and masquerade dances (particularly in the African context). ” Howard & Sheth (1969) describes culture as the “collective mental programming which people in a society have so that an individual’s behavior might be determined by his cultural background. Ekerete 2010 also emphasizes that culture is not only a narrow view of man’s activities based on individual experiences , but extend to include all the activities which characterize the behaviour of particular sets of people—the way they eat, how they talk, look and general behavioral pattern which might also include what they buy and how they buy it.

Culture in itself carries some important elements and according to Carter (2002) would include language, religion, values and attitudes, education, social organization, technology and material culture, law and politics etc. and for these reasons culture in itself remains a challenging element in the international marketing place. Companies such as nestle, shell exploration, KFC etc carry out business globally and as such must study the peculiar environment they find themselves with respect to the good and services they offer.

A close look at language (verbal and non verbal) as an element of culture would give better meaning to the topic at hand; For example: the Pepsi slogan "Come alive with the Pepsi Generation" when translated to Taiwanese, sounded "Pepsi will bring your ancestors back from the dead” or the Kentucky Fried Chicken slogan "Finger-lickin’ good" in Chinese, came out as "Eat your fingers off." (www.asianjoke.com), the wrong messages can be sent to the society thereby frustrating the market of the product being offered and does not sell the brand of the company offering it.

It is also important marketing organization should also identify differences in shared belief as regards to religion. For example, certain Christian sects in Nigeria do not allow their women wear trousers, so marketing “jeans trousers” to such a community of women would be a waste of resources and would definitely not speak well for the organization as this set of people view women wearing trousers as prostitutes.

Nadine Freitag (2005) rightly puts it that values and attitudes can affect acceptance of a product or the reaction to its origins. For example, a firm using yellow flowers in its logo or on the packaging of a product was well accepted in the United States but was a disaster in Mexico, where a yellow flower symbolizes death or disrespect. (Kotler and Armstrong, 1999). Such situations change the marketing orientation of an organization.

As described in the paragraphs above, cultural environment affects and determines the way people do things, what they buy and how they buy it which in turn has an effect on the marketing activities. Let’s take clothing as an example. As earlier mentioned, certain groups of Christian women in Nigeria consider trousers as a clothing for prostitutes, miniskirts are an abomination to Arabic women that are required to cover all of their bodies when they step out in public. In such instances, marketing activities are definitely altered because normal product promotion and sales need to be change to meet the target market. Also note that in the politics as an element of culture could also affect the acceptance of products by a particular group of people as seen in the case of the Arabic man and western education, an Arabic man might not be readily receptive to the idea of wearing a suit and tie or a jean and t-shirt.

Culture is an important consideration to be looked at by global corporations, there will always be a need to tailor marketing strategies and campaigns to the the peculiar target society.

References

Umoren (1996). Anthropology Contextualised in Nigerian Peoples and Culture. An

Unpublished Monograph, RSUST, Port Harcourt.

Howard & Sheth (1969). The Theory of Buyer Behavior. John Wiley & Sons, NewYork

P.P. Ekerete (2001). The Effect of Culture on Marketing Strategies of Multinational Firm. African Study Monographs, 22(2): 93-101, July 2001

Neidine Freitag (2005). Critical The Impact of Culture on International Marketing Plans and Review of the French Wine Industry. Available online from: http://www.grin.com/en/e-book/48094/critical-the-impact-of-culture-on-international-marketing-plans-and-review

Kotler and Armstrong (2009). The principles of marketing. Pearson education. Newyork 13^th ed