Body adornment and competitive athletic sports are examples of which of the following?

  Japanese values include striving for cooperation, consensus, self-denial, and harmony.
A Japanese belief is that they are unique in the world. Japanese youth believe that the West is an important source of fashion trends. Therefore, many Japanese share a favorable attitude towards American brands.

  Some Muslims have tapped into anti-American sentiment by urging a boycott of American brands due to U.S. military action in the Mideast following 9/11.

  Europeans are divided on the issue of referring to God and Christianity in a new European constitution. Strong Catholic countries like Ireland, Spain, Italy, and Poland are for inclusion. France and Belgium are strong advocates of separation of church and state. Europe’s politically active Muslim minority are resisting inclusion of Christianity in the EU Constitution.

Soft drink labels and color associated with good taste: Chinese associate brown. South Koreans and Japanese associate yellow. Americans associate red.

  Due to the backlash to fast food in France, especially le Big Mac, the French National Council of Culinary Arts designed a course on French cuisine and “good taste” for elementary students. The director of the council, Alexandre Lazareff, warns that France’s haute cuisine is under attack by globalization of taste. The French have a new buzzword, le fooding, to express the notion that the nation’s passion for food goes beyond mere gastronomy:
“To eat with feeling in France is to eat with your head and your spirit, with your nose, your eyes, and your ears, not simply your palate. Le fooding seeks to give witness to the modernity and new reality of drinking and eating in the 21st century. Everything is fooding so long as audacity, sense, and the senses mix.”

  Good Housekeeping magazine had to adapt for the Japanese market. “Housekeeping” is most closely translated as “domestic duties,” which may be tasks performed by servants. The magazine retained the name but the word “Good” is much larger than “Housekeeping” on the cover. The famous Good Housekeeping Seal was eliminated as it caused confusion among readers.

  In China, Dell had to find another way to express “direct sales” since the literal translation meant an illegal pyramid marketing scheme. Sales reps now use a phrase that translates as “direct orders.”

  Phonology: In Spanish, Colgate means “go hang yourself;” Whirlpool advertised extensively in Europe only to find that Italians, French, and Germans had trouble pronouncing the brand’s name. “Diesel” was chosen for the jeans brand because it is pronounced the same in every language.

  Technology is providing opportunities to exploit linguistics. Cell phone text messaging of certain number combinations takes on special meaning. In Korea, 8282 means “hurry up”, 7170 sounds like “close friend” and 4 5683 968 may be interpreted as “I love you.”

  After eBay acquired EachNet auction site in China, it used rebates and other promotions to attract visitors. It offered credits of 68 yuan on purchases of 168 or more. In Chinese, the word “six” is pronounced the same as “safe” and “eight” is pronounced the same as “prosperity.”

  Insisting on competitive bidding can cause complications in low-context cultures. In a high-context culture, the job is given to the person who will do the best work and whom you can trust and control. In a low-context culture, one tries to make the specifications so precise that a builder is forced by the threat of legal sanction to do a good job.

  The first dimension, power distance, is the extent to which the less powerful members of a society accept—even expect—power to be distributed unequally.

  The second dimension is a reflection of the degree to which individuals in a society are integrated into groups. In individualist cultures, each member of society is primarily concerned with his or her own interest and those of the immediate family. In collectivist cultures, all of society’s members are integrated into cohesive in-groups.

  Masculinity, the third dimension, describes a society in which men are expected to be assertive, competitive, and concerned with material success, and women fulfill the role of nurturer and are concerned with issues such as the welfare of children. Femininity, by contrast, describes a society in which the social roles of men and women overlap, with neither gender exhibiting overly ambitious or competitive behavior.

  Uncertainty avoidance is the extent to which the members of a society are uncomfortable with unclear, ambiguous, or unstructured situations.

  Long-term orientation (LTO) versus short-term orientation is interpreted as concerning “a society’s search for virtue,” rather than a search for truth. It assesses the sense of immediacy within a culture, whether gratification should be immediate or deferred.

  How might the European Disneyland been different if Disney executives had used the four-step approach?

  Step 1. Disney executives believe there is virtually unlimited demand for American cultural exports around the world. Evidence includes the success of McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Hollywood movies, and American rock music. Disney has a stellar track record in exporting its American management system and business style. Tokyo Disneyland, a virtual carbon copy of the park in Anaheim, California, has been a runaway success. Disney policies prohibit sale or consumption of alcohol inside its theme parks.

  Step 2. Europeans in general and the French in particular are sensitive about American cultural imperialism. Consuming wine with the midday meal is a long-established custom. Europeans have their own real castles, and many popular Disney characters come from European folk tales.

  Step 3. The significant differences revealed by comparing the findings in steps 1 and 2 suggest strongly that the needs upon which the American and Japanese Disney theme parks were based did not exist in France. A modification of this design was needed for European success.

  Step 4. This would require the design of a theme park that is more in keeping with French and European cultural norms. Allow the French to put their own identity on the park.

  1. Awareness. In the first stage the customer becomes aware for the first time of the product or innovation. An important early communication objective in global marketing is to create awareness of a new product through general exposure to advertising messages. Impersonal sources of information are most important at this stage.

  2. Interest. During this stage, the customer is interested enough to learn more. The customer has focused his or her attention on communications relating to the product and will engage in research activities and seek out additional information.

  3. Evaluation. In this stage the individual mentally assesses the product’s benefits in relation to present and anticipated future needs and, based on this judgment, decides whether or not to try it.

  4. Trial. Most customers will not purchase expensive products without the “hands-on” experience marketers call “trial.” A good example of a product trial that does not involve purchase is the automobile test drive. For inexpensive consumer packaged goods, trial often involves actual purchase or the distribution of free samples.

  5. Adoption. At this point, the individual either makes an initial purchase (in the case of the more expensive product) or continues to purchase—adopts and exhibits brand loyalty to—the less expensive product.

  2. Compatibility: The extent to which a product is consistent with existing values and past experiences of adopters. The history of innovations in international marketing is replete with failures caused by the lack of compatibility of new products in the target market. Ex.: VCR’s—Betamax and VHS.

  3. Complexity: The degree to which an innovation or new product is difficult to understand and use. Product complexity is a factor that can slow down the rate of adoption, particularly in developing country markets with low rates of literacy. In the 1990s, dozens of global companies were developing new interactive multimedia consumer electronics products. Complexity is a key design issue; it is a standing joke that in most households, VCR clocks flash 12:00 because users don’t know how to set them. To achieve mass success, new products will have to be as simple to use as slipping a prerecorded videocassette into a VCR.

  4. Divisibility: The ability of a product to be tried and used on a limited basis without great expense. Wide discrepancies in income levels around the globe result in major differences in preferred purchase quantities, serving sizes, and product portions. U.S.-size jars of Hellman’s Mayonnaise did not sell in South America. Less expensive, no refrigeration required, plastic packets were a hit.

  5. Communicability. The degree to which benefits of an innovation or the value of a product may be communicated to a potential market. A new digital cassette recorder from Philips was a market failure, in part because advertisements did not clearly communicate the fact that the product could make CD-quality recordings using new cassette technology while still playing older analog tapes.

  Innovators: These consumers tend to be venturesome, more cosmopolitan in their social relationships, and wealthier than those who adopt later.

  Early adopters: Early adopters are the most influential people in their communities, even more than the innovators. Thus the early adopters are a critical group in the adoption process, and they have great influence on the early and late majority, who comprise the bulk of the adopters of any product. Several characteristics of early adopters stand out. First, they tend to be younger, with higher social status, and in a more favorable financial position than later adopters. They must be responsive to mass media information sources and must learn about innovations from these sources because they cannot simply copy the behavior of early adopters.

  Coffee is a beverage category that illustrates the point. On the European continent, coffee has been consumed for centuries. By contrast, Britain has historically been a nation of tea drinkers, and the notion of afternoon tea is firmly entrenched in British culture. In the 1970s, tea outsold coffee by a ratio of 4-to-1. Brits who did drink coffee tended to buy it in instant form, because the preparation of instant is similar to that of tea. By the 1990s, however, Britain was experiencing an economic boom and an explosion of new nightclubs and restaurants. Trendy Londoners looking for a non-pub “third place” found it in the form of Seattle Coffee Company cafés. An instant success after the first store was opened by coffee-starved Americans in 1995, by 1998 Seattle Coffee had 55 locations around London. Starbucks bought the business from its founders for $84 million. By 2005, Starbucks had overcome the challenge of high real estate prices and had 466 locations in the United Kingdom.