International Marketing Summary of Ch. 5

Summary of Chapter 5
- International Marketing -

Jae Hyun Kim (4913920)

In chapter 5, the management style, which is a set of the business culture, management values, and business methods and behaviors, and business systems are important concepts. With those two factors’ close relationship to distinctive cultural aspects of countries throughout the world, how different dimensions of cultural aspects affect the formation of the management style and business systems is the main point that is articulated via diverse examples of different cultures.

Basically, degree of adaptation required varies among the different customs even within the same culture, ranging from imperatives, which is necessary factor to adapt to, and electives, which is welcomed to adapt to but not inevitable, to exclusives which strangers are excluded from the expectation of adaptation.

And while American business culture is deemed to have had enormous impact on the world business since 1990 with its objective, punctual and competitive aspects of customs, all the countries have their own cultural values and corresponding business in terms of different cultural dimensions.

Those dimensions include the followings : 1. Authority and decision making ; which is about how the decision within the company is made along with its hierarchical system and related to PDI(Power Distance Index) covered in Chapter 4. 2. Management objectives and aspirations ; this articulates what kind of value is deemed most important in the management. 3. Communication styles ; this dimension mainly differentiate between high-context culture where nonverbal and implicit aspects of communication are more important and low-context culture where communication is more explicit and verbal. 4. Formality and tempo ; how formal the business procedure is. 5. P-time vs. M-time ; whether orientation is set on punctuality or personal relationship. 6. Negotiations emphasis. 7. Marketing Orientation ; how the marketing is perceived compared to production. 8. Gender bias ; this is related to masculinity and femininity in appointing managers.

Ethical dimension is another important aspect of culture that has effect on business systems. Different cultural definition of corruption could be articulated via explanations of bribery and extortion, lubrication and subordination, agent’s fee. And social responsibilities of firm in different cultures with a lot of uncontrollable and unpredictable factors are further aspects to be considered.

All these cultural factors combined, the overall tendency of certain cultures could be subdivided into two, relationship-oriented where it is rather high-context, individualism, monochromic, etc. and information-oriented which is the opposite.