Cultural Distance. Critical Analysis of a Durex Campaign

Essay from the year 2014 in the subject Sociology - Consumption and Advertising, grade: 70, Kingston University London, course: Global Marketing, language: English, abstract: 'The failure to take cultural differences between countries into account has been the cause of many business failures'. Globalisation not only reaches all companies worldwide but influences international businesses in their ambition to enter into new markets and reach operational efficiency as well as profitability. Since one cannot automatically assume that the culture of foreign market is analogue to the home market, the success of the expanding strategy depends on the appropriate consideration of systematic variation between cultures. Therefore, the degree of similarities shared by societies needs to be quantified and forms the basis for either adaptation or standardisation in the targeted market. Especially when it comes to marketing decisions a product's success depends on the accuracy of the predicted consumer behaviour in respect of its values and attitudes. In this essay, the three major large-scale dimensional frameworks by Hofstede (1980), Schwartz (1980) and GLOBE (2004) are compared and the practicality of the frameworks on consumer behaviour will be evaluated. Furthermore, the relevance of the cultural distance approaches to the marketing of Durex is shown.