A Strategic Study On China's Global Branding-From An Intercultural Perspective

The 21st century is when brands compete against each other. With the continuous acceleration of economic globalization, an increasing number of multinational corporations have brought brand expansion and management to a strategic level. Despite the fact that the opportunity of globalization facilitates the promotion of Chinese products to the world market, they are confronted with fierce competition from strong foreign brands. As is known, the strength of made-in-China products consists in the cost advantage. Nevertheless, what determines the competitiveness in more developed areas is the brand advantage. In order to improve China's export situation, a breakthrough must be made by converting the current condition of manufacturing low-price products with sufficient intensive labor force to occupy foreign market into building world-reputed global brands. This thesis aims to explore how China is able to achieve successful brand globalization through the combination of effective intercultural communication and marketing strategy.Starting with the analysis of reasons for China's lack of global brands, this article proposes that besides the universally acknowledged factors related to quality of products or service, cultural disparity weighs more and more heavily in barriers to global branding. Moreover, the perpetual existence of Chinese brands in international stage entails the support of rich cultural contents in brands. The cultural factor is by no means to be neglected.Then, this thesis sheds light on the relationship between culture and brands, the cultural conflicts and elements reflected in the process of global branding, the latter of which includes values, customs and habits, language and symbols and corporate culture. Based on the systematic analysis, the thesis further puts forward the cultural strategy of how to take advantage of cultural strength and in the meantime overcome cultural difference with a view to the formulation of successful marketing tactics.Ultimately, two comparative cases are employed. The first case Pizza hut serves as the example of successful global branding while in the second case for Chinese pearls, the author portrays causes of pearls'difficulty in going global and proposes suggestions for the Chinese pearl industry.In principal, the major conclusion of this thesis is: endowing brands with uniform image and cultural meanings in various foreign markets, that is, the standardization of core brand values; formulating different marketing tactics to different target markets, that is, the customization of marketing tactics.Of course, culture does not constitute the only cause of China's difficulty in global branding, which naturally requires the thesis to satisfy some hypothesis. Meanwhile, the information collection is not complete. Accordingly, there are probably some limitations for the whole thesis.