Each territory has its own unique traditions, rules and prohibitions. Before developing a marketing program, a marketer needs to understand how the foreign consumer perceives and uses various products. Here are some examples of potential surprises that the consumer market may bring:
The average Frenchman uses almost twice as much cosmetics and toiletries as his wife.
Germans and Europeans from Lyon and Marseille consume, on average, more pre-packaged branded pasta than residents of Rome and Milan.
Italian children prefer to snack on a chocolate bar by placing it between two pieces of bread.
In Tanzania, women do skype data package not allow their children to eat eggs, fearing that it could cause baldness or infertility.
Failure to take cultural context into account can negatively impact a company's success. Even some of the most successful American market participants have experienced setbacks when expanding internationally.
Cultural environment
For example, the Kentucky Fried Chicken chain opened 11 locations in Hong Kong, but after two years, they were all gone. Perhaps Hong Kong residents were uncomfortable eating fried chicken with their hands. McDonald's opened its first restaurant in Europe in a suburb of Amsterdam, but sales were lower than expected. The company did not take into account the fact that most Europeans live in the center of big cities and are less mobile than Americans.
There are differences between countries in the standards of business conduct they establish. An American businessman should be familiar with these differences before entering into negotiations abroad. Here are some examples of business conduct in different countries:
In Latin America, it is common to conduct business negotiations almost face to face, literally very close to the interlocutor. Americans feel awkward in such a situation and retreat, but the partner continues to reduce the distance, which can irritate both parties.
During negotiations, Japanese businessmen almost never respond negatively to their American counterparts. The latter may be confused by this, since they usually get straight to the point. The Japanese consider this insulting.
In France, wholesalers do not use sales promotion methods. They simply find out what retailers want and supply the corresponding product. But if an American company decides to use the same methods as French wholesalers, it may face failure.
Each country (as well as individual regions within it) has its own cultural traditions, preferences and prohibitions that a business representative needs to study.
How to achieve multiple growth in traffic and sales from your website?
Alexey Boyarkin
Dmitry Svistunov
Head of SEO and Development
Read more posts on my personal blog:
I have always been concerned about the issue of moving to a fundamentally new level. So that the indicators would grow not by 2 or 3 times, but by several orders of magnitude. From a thousand visits to ten thousand or from ten thousand to a hundred thousand, if we are talking about a website, for example.
And I know that such leaps are always the result of painstaking work in five areas:
Technical condition of the site.
SEO.
Collection of site semantics.
Creating useful content.
Working on conversion.
And at the same time, every manager needs an increase in sales and the number of applications from the site at the moment.
To get this growth, download our step-by-step template for increasing sales from the site: