Cross-Culture Marketing Of Culturally-Loaded Products

As one of the most ancient civilization in the world, China has a long-standing history, profound culture. During the 5000-year civilized development, diligent and creative Chinese have invented and made numerous products which are culturally-loaded with national characteristics, such as, elegant silk, scent-smelt tea, delicate food and mysterious Chinese traditional medicine. All those products, well known in the world for a long time, are popular among consumers all over the globe. Once silk or tea is mentioned, everyone knows that they are produced in an ancient oriental country-China.But, with great regret, Chinese national culture products have not successfully marketed in international market yet. The sales volume of such does not match their popularity and reputation. Whereas, the American enterprises are quite successful in their cross-cultural marketing of American cultural products, like Coca Cola, McDonald, KFC and Hollywood Movie. Compared with China, the U.S. does not have a long history or rich culture legacy. All the Chinese enterprises should take that into serious consideration, how to learn the advanced and successful marketing practices conducted by foreign counterparts, and how to match the national cultural characteristics and foreign consumers' behavior. Those tremendous challenge which Chinese entrepreneur have to face. Hey must make worldwide consumers understand Chinese national culture products and accept them more by way of formulating rational marketing idea and mix on a new perception. Once successful, the consequential profits of both economic and social are incredible. Within the field of international marketing, the challenge of how to make consumers with distinguished cultural backgrounds accept foreign cultural products, especially those highly culturally-loaded products, such as Chinese traditional medicine. The marketers have to pay close attention to the various consumers' psychology and behavior, as well as their own highly cultural contexts of products. Double national cultural differences are the critical elements of the mentioned challenges and difficulties.In order to pursue success of those marketing practices, marketers, first of all, should understand the meaning or definition of culture and differences of cultures, since they want to conduct cross-cultural marketing. It is believed that culture is a sum of shared values, beliefs, behaviors and way of living shared by its members. In regard to that, the difference between various cultures shall be based on basic values of people. In this thesis, the theory of culture difference, by Hofstede's "Culture Difference"(1980) is quoted to study those differences based on four elements. 1. Individualism2. Power Difference3. Masculinity4. Uncertainty AvoidanceAccording to those, the difference between Eastern and Western cultures are clear. Eastern culture emphasizes on collectivism, family, personal relations acceptance of unequal allocation of power, whereas Western culture emphasizes on individualism, freedom, profit-oriented, ready for uncertainty. When conducting cross-cultural marketing, marketers must take those basic elements into serious considerations.In this thesis, I pay a good deal of attention to the theories of Paul A. Herbig's " Handbook of Cross-Cultural Marketing" (1998), and Cheryle Nakata & K. Sivakumar's " National Culture and New Products Development( 1999). Based on those theories and studies of several scholars', I came to the hypotheses as follows:1. Before implementing cross-cultural marketing, the study of the marketability of the culturally-loaded product is essential;2. The probability of success of cross-cultural marketing has the positive correlation with the distance of cultural distance.3. The greater cultural difference, the greater possibility of joint-venture and/or Greenfield investment vs direct export;4. The necessity and feasibility of standardized product strategy of national cultural products.To prove those hypotheses, I studied and exa...