Cross Cultural Marketing By Mncs In India

Strategies adopted by MNC’s for Cross Cultural marketing in terms of India

Introduction

Marketing is commonly associated with endeavors such as branding, selling, and advertising, but it also encompasses activities and processes related to production, product development, distribution, and many other functions. Furthermore, on a less tangible level, marketing facilitates the distribution of goods and services within a society, particularly in free markets. Evidence of the pivotal role that marketing plays in free markets is the vast amount of resources it consumes: about 50 percent of all consumer Rs, in fact, pay for marketing-related activities.

Basic tenet of human behavior reveals an important aspect of marketing function—that producers are not capable of creating or shaping basic needs, but rather achieve marketing success by influencing wants. In other words, a chief goal of a marketing manager's job is to stimulate customers' "wants" for a product or service by persuading the consumer that the offering can help them better satisfies one or more of their needs.

And these needs vary from person to person, but still the common binding factor between needs of people from a common region is their culture. Its culture that defines what the need of the people is and how they prioritize it. For e.g. Indian culture focuses on sharing, and living together as one big family, so any product which promotes individuality and segmentation between relations will not be welcome in Indian society.

Indian Culture

The term culture refers to a state of intellectual development or manners. The social and political forces that influence the growth of a human being are defined as culture.

Indian culture is rich and diverse and as a result unique in its very own way. Our manners, way of communicating with one another, etc are one of the important components of our culture. Even though we have accepted modern means of living, improved our lifestyle, our values and beliefs still remain unchanged. A person can change his way of clothing, way of eating and living but the rich values in a person always remains unchanged because they are deeply rooted within our hearts, mind, body and soul which we receive from our culture.

Some components of Indian culture are like

- Respect for elders

- Treating guest as equivalent of God.

- Respect for each other, and treating everybody as equals.

- Helping others, and sharing your joys with others.

HOSFETED’s Culture Dimension:

On Individualism rating Indian gets a low score of just 48, which is almost the half of US score of 91, but still India scores highest amongst its rest of Asian counterparts. This basically represents how the Indian society is oriented, in which people from birth onwards are integrated into strong, cohesive in-groups, often extended families (with uncles, aunts and grandparents) which continue protecting them in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. So we can see how important family ties are in India as compared to the US, and its European counterparts who score higher on this score.

Power distance Index, is a representation of how much is the power distance in the country. India has Power Distance (PDI) as the highest Hofstede Dimension for the culture, with a ranking of 77 compared to a world average of 56.5. This Power Distance score for India indicates a high level of inequality of power and wealth within the society. This condition is not subverted upon the population, but rather accepted by the population as a cultural norm. This score of India is much high as compared to that of US (40), and the other European countries.

India has Masculinity as the third highest ranking Hofstede Dimension at 56, with the world average just slightly lower at 51. The higher the country ranks in this Dimension, the greater the gap between values of men and women. It may also generate a more competitive and assertive female population, although still less than the male population.

India's lowest ranking Dimension is Uncertainty Avoidance (UAI) at 40, compared to the world average of 65. On the lower end of this ranking, the culture may be more open to unstructured ideas and situations. The population may have fewer rules and regulations with which to attempt control of every unknown and unexpected event or situation, as is the case in high Uncertainty Avoidance countries.

India's Long Term Orientation (LTO) Dimension rank is 61, with the world average at 48. A higher LTO score can be indicative of a culture that is perseverant and parsimonious.

Consumerism as a Cultural Phenomenon

CONSUMERISM AS AN ETHNOCULTURAL PHENOMENON

Culture includes various aspects of social life-from religion to everyday

Practices, from mundane to profound, from institutions to ideologies, from ideas to

Activities, and from social formations to meaning systems. In fact, many aspects of cultural life have developed historically, either through internal evolution or by external imposition. Dealing with such varied topics requires a rich framework that can be obtained only by a deeper examination of the cultures in question and their practices, value systems, and behavioral norms as they relate to consumption.

No culture stands still. There is no such thing as a pure culture except in the minds of people. By both definition and historical circumstance, cultural phenomena are subject to change. Cultures evolve constantly, because of either their own internal dynamics or external (global) influences. About the only thing that can be said in regard to cultural change, or constancy is that some cultures change more rapidly than other cultures, and some cultures may experience more rapid changes at some points in their history than at other times. In the contemporary world, local cultures are changing quite rapidly because of the rising tide of consumerism. A new form of industrial and market culture is developing in many parts of the world with the diffusion of information, communication, and transportation technologies.

Ethnicity is a catch-all collective

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