Culture and Perceptions and Attitudes and Values Essay

Culture and Perceptions and Attitudes and Values - Essay Example Culture relates to the set of beliefs and traditions which is followed by a segment of a nation's community and includes sub cultures, corporate cultures as well as national and social cultures. It includes religious beliefs, norms, traditions, rituals etc that is specific to that particular country or region. The cultural framework encompasses within its gamut, various other factors such as language, religion, values, attitudes, and educational qualifications that is peculiar to the nation and plays a significant role in influencing their purchase decisions. For instance, in the case of famous beverage marketing firm Captain Morgan rum the marketing management of the company perceived Hispanic male consumers as probable target audience to whom the product could be successfully marketed and sold. However, such a notion was held wrong since the Hispanics perceived the product as symbolizing domination and exploitation owing to the company logo of a pirate. This proves that the concept / idea that were appealing to the Anglos were found to be disgusting by the Hispanics owing to their cultural differences (Korzenny, 2005). In China, the year 2007 which was considered to be the year of the pig - a symbol of wealth and prosperity according to their culture and traditions, all the advertisements related to pigs were banned. The move was intended to respect the religious sentiments of the 20 million odd Muslim population and was considered as a gesture of respect to their traditional values (The Sunday times, 2007). In the year 2005, France's Catholic Church banned an advertisement (Appendix 2) featuring a popular clothing brand which was based on Leonardo Da Vinci's Christ's last Supper since it hurt the religious sentiments of the Catholics world wide (BBC News, 2005). In 2004 China banned the Nike advertisement featuring LeBron James battling a cartoon kung fu master, alleging that it was a national insult and it hurt the dignity of the nation (China daily, 2004). International Marketing can be better understood in terms of high - context and low - context culture whereby it is argued that people belonging to the same set of backgrounds share a high degree of understanding of the concepts intended to be depicted in the advertisements and hence the need to explain or clarify the intentions is not recognized. High context culture largely relies on non verbal communication since it is fast and efficient within their group eliminating the need to explain or explicitly express the intended meaning, their behavior is predictable and is considered to be misinterpreted or incomprehensible by outsiders i.e., those belonging to the low context culture (Bennett, Blythe, Pp.44). These specific points related to high context and low context culture needs to be understood adequately since it holds utmost significance in terms of international marketing of products or services. It helps the marketers to better understand the targeted consumer groups and assist them in designing appropriate marketing campaigns suitable to their tastes and cultures. People's attitudes and values are also crucial in ascertaining the appropriateness of the choice of marketing campaigns in accordance to the country's cultural, national, political, economical and social