Executive Summary
Consumer behavior is a transitional topic that is highly dependent on various factors and has been a constant subject of change post world war 11. In the essay, cultural aspects of societies that include values, language, religion, economics, and business ethics have been dissected to try and give an insight into how consumers come to make choices. Managers consider consumer behavior of high value since it enables them promote their firm by closely monitoring on the customer. The essay addresses how consumers arrive at a decision based on their attitudes regarding a good or service and how these attitudes shift along with changes in quality of life, technological advancements, design, and other trends. Characteristics primarily determine a product’s success, and managers use customer behavior patterns as a promotional tool. Due to continuous trends in consumer behavior tied to cultural diversities, organizations have had to make adjustments to adapt to the global market’s needs. The essay discusses some of Mercedes international’s adaptations in its marketing strategies to suit the different cultural segments and achieve its goal. In their pursuit to glue customers to their products, organizations encounter difficulties that only lower their success rate. Solutions to these difficulties are dissected, and recommendations are given to perfect the process.
Introduction
Consumer behavior in business administration is concerned with the usage and discard of items and how they are acquired. The services or products that a customer often uses are of considerable importance to the marketer since they may assist them in determining how a brand should be presented to entice customers to buy more. When it comes to consumer behavior, decision-making techniques are frequently utilized to organize theoretical concepts. Researchers proposed theoretical frameworks to understand better what occurs in a real-world scenario until a customer chooses to purchase a service or product. According to Walters (1978), the consumer decision-making framework defines the precise cause-effect relationships that pertain to customer behavior. Consumer decision-making frameworks have numerous benefits, such as (1) provision of theoretical viewpoints that clearly show the interrelationship of different factors; (3) the ability to visualize what happens as parameter settings and situational factors change; (2) the the capacity to comprehend various customer decision making and marketing strategies; and (4) the ability to contribute significantly to the development of theory. The essay underpins the consumer cultural variations and the resultant effect on buying behavior based on the cross-cultural marketing strategies that employ specific consumer behavior theories.
Cross-Cultural Marketing of Mercedes Benz Brand
Mercedes Benz is a multinational firm that sells cars worldwide. This corporation has maintained its prosperity via segmenting the market without compromising its status. The company intends to advertise its vehicles in numerous cultural areas. A diverse marketing communications strategy is essential to guarantee that Mercedes Benz’s primary brand is customized to its diverse intended audience. Awareness of the cultural roots of cross-cultural marketing demands cultural knowledge. Marketing and advertising need such distinctions. Culture has a role in different marketing and communications tactics that may be utilized to adapt the message. This approach will guarantee that the primary message is transmitted to diverse target audiences by analyzing cultural context, assessing cultural distinctions, concentrating on trends, and examining cultural differences.
Cultural Adaptations to Marketing Strategies
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By exchanging opinions with other players, the Cross-Cultural Marketing Strategy for Mercedes Benz guarantees that the primary content impacts the target audience’s purchase behavior. The communication must originate from a reliable source that includes words meant for the recipient. Ensuring that the information is presented to the receiving culture instead of the original culture ensures that the actual content will transcend cultural boundaries. Because various people see and utilize Mercedes Benz goods differently, the communication strategy considers these differences. Because the way customers behave and engage with interests may differ depending on their cultural background, it is critical to understand the cultures that the firm aims to target. The Mercedes brand will cover critical variables like geographical location and population. The marketer will be able to assess if a geographical location is homogeneous with culture, whether geographical limits are comparable to cultural divides, or if the brand will match the culture’s expectations as a result of this. Mercedes Benz has been able to evaluate the cultural differences to define the intended audience formulation strategies
Following Hofstede’s cultural dimensions theory, it is imperative to understand the marketing strategies apply to the cultural setting. To understand diverse cultures, diverse questions like social beliefs, values, behaviors, and traditions of institutions and organizations passed from generations require various business techniques and unique marketing mixtures (Wu 2006). To effectively reach the target audience from different cultures, Mercedes needed to employ strategic market segmentation. That is to say, dividing markets into groups or submarkets with similar characteristics in terms of geographical location, tastes and preferences, and cultural adaptations. The segmentation aids in identifying in-groups that make an impact on customer behavior. Marketing professionals have utilized this information to create customized campaigns for specific target audiences for marketing the Mercedes brand.
Cultural Adaptations to Marketing Strategies
Certain cultures associate time with significance, requiring that something significant be built up thoughtfully and gradually over time. Like those seen in countries like the United States, individualistic cultures are more likely to respond favorably to advertising that emphasizes the advantages to the individuals and emphasizes personal accomplishment and individuality (Han & Shavitt 1994). Advertising’s reliance on celebrities is a kind of collectivism since a celebrity serves the purpose of giving a face to a brand among a sea of identically branded goods. To this effect, Mercedes international is employing collectivist advertisements in nations such as Korea and China, where they believe that whatever group appeals are more effective. Advertisements in individualistic cultures seek to create personal connections and confidence between seller and buyer rather than persuading consumers. Adverts in Korea are more concerned with evoking pleasant sensations than presenting the information. Differences in the time and frequency of the Mercedes brand name in television adverts are mirrored in the diverse reasons. Korean television commercials tend to introduce the brand, business name, or product far later than American television commercials. It is more common in Chinese advertisements than in American advertisements for the brand to be acknowledged later on.
According to Geert Hofstede’s research, Chinese tradition has a higher degree of ‘uncertainty avoidance’, which indicates that obscurity and insecurity are mostly uncomfortable in society (Wu, 2006). This explains why the Chinese are wary of taking chances and strive to prevent losses at all costs. Contrarily, persons in Western cultures have a low degree of uncertainty avoidance and do not see ambiguity or uncertainty as a danger. To this effect, commercials on Chinese televisions are based on the use of a clip to demonstrate how the Mercedes product will improve the lives of Chinese people. A Chinese person displays pleasant feelings and experiences after using Mercedes automobiles and other products to show the brand’s benefits to other Chinese people.
Weaknesses of Consumer Behavioral Theories
According to this view, consumers are logical individuals who invest a significant period searching for information, evaluating various options, and selecting the ideal goods that effectively meet their needs. As a result, scholars argue that individuals may just invest a little amount of time and attention for many items and never participate in some of the successive processes that have been identified as crucial in the final decision stage. Furthermore, Critics say that cross-cultural marketing methods generalize consumers’ decision processes. There is a presumption that the more essential a commodity is, the more difficult it is for buyers to make an informed decision. That is why not all customers go via the whole five decision-making procedures; instead, some customers skip certain stages and make choices based on their perceptions when the item is not essential to them (Burns and Gentry, 1990).
Although the study’s results on the effect of metaphorical expressions on thoughts and behaviors are significant for comprehending how advertisement works, the designers do not acknowledge the respondents’ country cultures as if their conclusions are universally acceptable. As a result, the findings are only partially valid. Some of the most pressing issues in advertising studies are the efficacy of different operational strategies and the timing of standardizing various aspects of marketing. To answer these questions, we will have to assume that people look at advertising in a piecemeal fashion. On the other hand, consumers take the picture holistically how people say things are not the best approach to assessing how advertising operates in various cultures. Customers often accept advertising based on how it is communicated to them. In light of this, individualistic cultures may get irritated by collectivist commercials and vice versa.
Opportunities for Improvement
There lie great opportunities for making strides in achieving top-notch marketing strategies across diverse cultures based on understanding particular groups’ essential peculiar cultural components. Many organizations have embraced agility in their marketing strategies because they are ready to adapt to trends to navigate barriers to effective cross-cultural communication. Organizations may stifle innovation when they get too entrenched in their doing things. Because continual development needs a certain degree of adaptability and open-mindedness, businesses must instead concentrate on it. Trying new techniques of executing ideas to understand better other people’s viewpoints is a great approach to integrating this principle in cross-cultural marketing.
Over the recent years, organizations have made efforts towards acknowledging cultural diversities hence becoming aware of cultural differences and their effect on social and economic toll on the marketing of products. Several organizations have made a concerted effort to better understand and empathize with the perspectives of their target audiences. Internal communications have been audited at all levels of the company. The purpose and corporate values, whether or not they are diverse, and whether or not the global market’s varied cultures have been considered carefully are all examined during this whole process. To effectively serve the global market and meet your objectives, corporations should undertake this journey to have a clear picture of the current status of their company’s culture and marketing strategy.
Recommendations for Improvement
In the plight of the ever-diversifying cultural parameters, it is paramount that organizations should adopt the following to bypass the cross-cultural marketing barriers; (1) have proper knowledge of global cultures and incorporate them into communication; (2) accept cultural differences without making a judgment; (3) seek common ground, shared agreement, and reduction of the complex procedure of operating under diverse cultural circumstances; (4) manage cultural differences by acknowledging neither cultural aspects is superior hence minimizing impacts of cultural variations on marketing techniques chosen,
Conclusion
An organization’s ability to succeed in the global marketplace in the twenty-first century will need a full awareness of cultural diversity to take advantage of the many economic possibilities created by the global village. There will be more and more cultural distinctions in global marketplaces as the cycle of globalization progresses. Advertisers employ cross-cultural marketing to reach customers from diverse cultural backgrounds than their own. Social conventions, beliefs, religion, economic systems, and business ethics are just a few instances of the cultural variables that must be considered. The essay uncovered significant cultural variations that demonstrate the existence of universal cultural truths. Cultural viewpoints, cultural factors, cross-cultural marketing weaknesses based on consumer behavior theories, and recommended actions to address the obstacles that firms experience due to market variations have all been explored. Regional differences and their effects on advertisement appeals have been thoroughly discussed in this essay hence shading light into the cultural translation of Hofstede’s theory of consumer behavior in societies.
When it comes to figuring out cultural variations in consumer behavior, the Hofstede model of national culture has shown to be an effective tool. It is necessary to have a theoretical understanding of the different representations important to these business domains to apply the model to the promotion of products, which initially sought solutions to job value disparities. Because of the increasing severity of competition to acquire worldwide clients, exploring consumers’ decision-making processes is considered an extremely significant issue in market research (Lee & Back, 2008). Cross-cultural disparities and marketing weaknesses may be solved by learning the alien culture, languages of other nations, respect for clients’ cultures and religions, and comprehending subtleties in language. Organizations may overcome cross-cultural marketing issues worldwide by using all of the recommendations mentioned above.
References
Burns, A. C., & Gentry, J. W. (1990). Toward improving household consumption behavior research: avoidance of pitfalls in using alternative household data collection procedures. ACR Lee, J. S., & Back, K. J. (2008). Attendee-based brand equity. Tourism management, 29(2), 331- 344.
Han, S. P., & Shavitt, S. (1994). Persuasion and culture: Advertising appeals in individualistic and collectivistic societies. Journal of experimental social psychology, 30(4), 326-350.
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Walters, C. G. (1978). Consumer Behavior: Theory and Practice, Homewood, Richard D. Irwin, In.
Wu, M. (2006). Hofstede’s cultural dimensions 30 years later: A study of Taiwan and the United States. Intercultural communication studies, 15(1), 33.
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