A Study On The Cultural Elements Of Occidental Automobile Marketing

Since Benz emerged as the world's first automobile brand in 1885, it has been more than a hundred years for the development of automobile industry. During the past hundred years, there has never been a commodity like automobiles that can completely change man's life. Also there has never been a commodity like automobiles that can symbolize the certain history and culture. Neatly every aspect of our lives has developed around this technology. Cars have become the indispensable part of people's lives. Besides the conveniences automobiles can bring to people, they can show the status or personality of the consumers. The car culture is created. Nowadays the competition in the occidental automobile industry has become increasing fierce. Automobile corporations try their best to increase their marketing shares by using various marketing strategies. They pay more attention to the cultural elements that influence consumer buying behavior. Therefore, culture-centric marketing programs have been phenomenal in occidental countries.Cultural marketing, as the term suggests, refers to the use of culture or cultural matters to organize the whole marketing process. The cultural marketing is the marketing strategy in response to consumers' different requirements through establishing the strong and powerful culture. In the process, the commodities are regarded as the carrier of culture. At the same time the culture has become the core selling point of the commodities. The consumers' buying process can be taken as the process of accepting the certain culture embedded in the commodities. Automobile companies use the cultural resources or cultural ideas to create, transmit and enhance the value of automobile and service; to create and satisfy the consumers' need for certain culture. That is the automobile cultural marketing. Usually the cultural marketing strategies are designed to meet the consumers' value concept anchored in the consumers' mind. They focus on bringing up the consumers' loyalty to the enterprises and their products. They can be carried out in spreading automobile knowledge and a series of popularizing activities. As the new marketing mode, cultural marketing can help automobile companies solve the integrative marketing issues, and it will propel managers to think more about the development of the enterprise on the view of consumers and society. But in the process of cultural marketing, companies are required to add the new items to the marketing tactics to meet social and cultural development. The purpose is to keep the higher loyalty of product culture,brand culture and corporate culture in the consumers' mind. The purpose of this thesis is to make a systematic analysis on of occidental automobile cultural marketing, so as to give inspiration to the Chinese automobile marketing.In this thesis the author first gives a brief introduction of the history of automobile industry. Then in the first part of Chapter Two, the author explains the marketing from cultural perspective to stress the cultural factors in marketing. In the second part of Chapter Two the impact of cultural element on marketing is addressed. Chapter III is focus of this paper which introduces occidental automobile cultural marketing in terms of automobile culture,brand culture and corporate culture. In the fourth chapter, author provides Buick branding strategies to illustrate automobile cultural marketing. Through the study of Buick, we can draw lessons for China automobile marketing. Finally in Chapter Five author sets two examples of Chinese automobile cultural marketing. One of them is success, the other is failure. The purpose is to find out the advantage and disadvantage conditions for China automobile cultural marketing. In the end the personal thoughts are introduced.