Marcel
Schnalke (South Africa), Roger B. Mason (South Africa)
The influence of culture on marketing communications: critical
cultural factors influencing South African and German businesses
Globalization has increased people’s
need to be involved in international activities. Due to the fact that people
from different cultures become more and more interdependent on each other,
intercultural communication is becoming a common issue to deal with. Regarding
the increasing importance of intercultural communication, many scholars and
researchers have produced works on various topics related to intercultural
communication (Boroditsky, 2010). According to Samovar et al. (2007, p. 10), “intercultural
communication involves interaction between people whose cultural perceptions
and symbol systems are distinct enough to alter the communication event”.
According to de Mooij (2005), there are
different meanings of culture. The most common definitions of culture are found
in anthropological literature. According to Albaum et al. (2002), culture is
human-made, so it is learned and is communicated from one generation to
another. This definition corresponds with the statement of Keegan (2002) who stated
that cultures are ways of living built up by a group of human beings, which are
transmitted from one generation to another
One of the elements of culture is
education which plays a major role in a society. At school, individuals learn
the substantial skills which are needed in a modern society. Cultural norms,
like respect for others, obedience to authority, honesty, neatness and being on
time are taught at school (Hill, 2011). Another cultural factor, of importance,
is religion. Cateora and Graham (2007)
Language is also another cultural
element of key interest. Language is part of culture and plays a very important
role in it. According to Jiang (2000), without language culture would not be
possible, because the former reflects culture and is simultaneously influenced
and shaped by it. Facts or ideas or events that are communicable refer to
shared knowledge between people as well as beliefs and attitudes which are
shared with others
Companies are always searching for
competitive advantage and the emerging global landscape defines the firm’s
opportunities and challenges. Open markets, rise in discretionary income and
modern tools for accessing global markets provide great opportunities for
businesses to pursue their international customers. Beside the opportunities
for companies to enter a global market, there are challenges as well. The
complexity of managing multiple markets and coordinating the marketing
communications strategy as well as the difficulty of managing geographic,
cultural, political barriers are factors which hinders the companies’ success
in the global markets (Cavusgil and Cavusgil, 2011).
The study was undertaken as a
quantitative survey research combined with qualitative in-depth interviews to
help interpret the information obtained from the survey. The sampling frame was
based on the Membership Directory 2010/2011 of the Southern African-German
Chamber of Commerce and Industry with contact details of 500 companies located
in South Africa and dealing with German businesses. From this Membership
Directory, relevant staff formed the sampling frame. The final number of
respondents depended on how many responded. Thus, the final sample was a
self-selected sample.
Four out of five statements had a high
level of agreement (between 81.4% and 91.6%), which confirms that the different
elements of culture do have an effect on marketing communications. The
statement about people’s religious background had an agreement level that was
only 45.1%, with 38% of the respondents neither agreeing nor disagreeing and
16.90% disagreeing with the statement. This is interesting because it was
expected that all statements would have a high agreement level since religious
background is strongly related to culture. One of the reasons for this finding
might be that the respondents interpreted the questions in a different way than
the researcher intended.
Germans are more time conscious and have
a higher adherence to deadlines than their South African business partners.
This difference in attitude may be attributed to the cultural diversity in
South Africa. Amongst the different cultural groups in South Africa, there are
different attitudes towards time, which may influence the way South Africans
relate to Germans. Although these differences exist, they do not negatively
influence business relationships.
Although some companies seem to find it
difficult to adapt their marketing messages to suite different cultural groups,
successful international companies often employ agents who know the target
market in a given country, to operate in that country. Another option has been
to work together with local marketing agencies that are experts on the behavior
of the specific target market. The consumer communication problems hinted at in
this study could indicate that classical advertising approaches such as print media
are not adequate to get messages across in a dynamic cross-cultural business
environment. New media and Internet communication are maybe the approaches
which promise the most success for communicating effectively.
