CHAPTER 4: SOCIAL AND CULTURAL

ENVIRONMENTS

LECTURE 07

INTRODUCTION
Society, culture and global consumer culture
Attitudes, Values and Beliefs
Religion and aesthetics
Dietary preferences, languages and

communication
High and Low context cultures
Hofstedes Cultural Typology

SOCIETY, CULTURE AND GLOBAL

CONSUMER CULTURE
Role of the marketer
Understanding of culture
Incorporation of cultural elements in the marketing planning process
Pakistani ads
Adaptation and shared cultural characteristics
Indian ads?

Culture
ways of living, built up by a group of human beings, that are transmitted from

one generation to another

Geert Hofstede defines culture as the collective programming of the

mind that distinguishes the members of one category of people from

those of another.
Programmed Behaviors
Rituals
Bonus in 10 rupees
111-44-622

SOCIETY, CULTURE AND GLOBAL

CONSUMER CULTURE
Material culture
Margaret Thatcher
Non-material culture
Which is more important?
Ajwa paste
Consumption based global consumer cultures
Coffee
Credit card
Fast food
Soccer

ATTITUDES, VALUES AND BELIEFS

An attitude is a learned tendency to respond in a consistent way to a

given object or entity. Attitudes are clusters of interrelated beliefs

Share

happiness

A belief is an organized pattern of knowledge that an individual holds

to be true about the world

Chinese

goods

A value can be defined as an enduring belief or feeling that a specific

mode of conduct is personally or socially preferable to another mode

of conduct
Vital

Tea
Orient
Ethics VS. Economics

Subcultures are smaller groups of people with their own shared

subset of attitudes, beliefs, and values

Kalash

RELIGION and
AESTHETICS
McDonalds in India
Ramadan in the Muslim world
Fasting or feasting?
Mecca Cola and Qibla Cola?
Pak Ser Zameen Party?
Aesthetics: an overall sense of what is beautiful and what is

not beautiful and what represents good taste as opposed to

tastelessness
Tapal Vs Tapal Tezdum
Red: mostly positive connotation but poorly received in some

African countries
White: denotes purity and cleanliness in the West but
associated with death in many parts of Asia

DIETARY PREFERENCES, LANGUAGE

AND COMMUNICATION
Sub-continent?
In China, Dell had to find a meaningful interpretation

of direct sales, the phrase that describes the

companys powerful business model. A literal
translation results in zhi xiao, which is the Chinese
term for illegal pyramid marketing schemes. To
counteract the negative connotation, Dells sales
representatives began using the phrase zhi xiao ding
gou, which translates as direct orders.
Communication Issues
Sequencing
Phasing

MARKETINGS IMPACT ON CULTURE

Shared preferences
Orya Maqbool Jan
McDonaldization of culture
Sociologist George Ritzer: Eating is at the
heart of most cultures and for many it is
something on which much time, attention and
money are lavished. In attempting to alter the
way people eat, McDonaldization poses a
profound threat to the entire cultural complex
of many societies.
Reverse engineering

HIGH AND LOW CONTEXT

CULTURES
low-context culture: messages are explicit and

specific; words carry most of the communication

power
high-context culture: less information is
contained in the verbal part of a message. Much
more information resides in the context of
communication, including the background,
associations, and basic values of the communicators
Legal paper work
Background information
Threat of legal sanctions

HOFSTEDES CULTURAL TYPOLOGY

Culture of different nations can be expressed in 5

different dimensions
The first dimension, power distance, is the

extent to which the less powerful members of a

society accepteven expectpower to be
distributed unequally. To paraphrase Orwell, all
societies are unequal, but some are more
unequal than others. Hong Kong and France are
both high power distance cultures; low power
distance characterizes Germany, Austria, the
Netherlands, and Scandinavia

HOFSTEDES CULTURAL TYPOLOGY

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
interests and those of his or her immediate family.
In collectivist cultures, all of societys members are
integrated into cohesive in-groups. High
individualism is a general aspect of culture in the
United States and Europe; low individualism is
characteristic of Japanese
and other Asian culture patterns.