Culture Affects All Business Functions 63 useful for learning what to anticipate in working across cultures. We hope that in your own work you will look for cultural differences and seek out opportunities to build your knowledge of other cultures. Study Smart and Improve Your Grades Go to http://bit.ly/SmartBookNOW Culture Affects All Business Functions Everything we do is influenced by culture, a fact most of us realize about other cultures, but not always about our own. Here we look at ways national cultural differences can affect the functional areas of a business with an international presence, a good place to begin our focus on the role of culture in international business. MARKETING As you might imagine, the wide variation in cultural attitudes and values across markets requires that many firms develop a variety of marketing mixes to reach their consumers. To build effective marketing campaigns, the marketer has to understand the foreign market beyond its surface. The more she or he can understand how customers in the target market give meaning to events in their world and how they think their world should be, the better. Companies have made many costly mistakes introducing products into foreign markets, especially in product design, advertising, and pricing. A U.S. company trying to sell a cranberry liqueur called Bogs in the UK, where bog is slang for outhouse, is one example. Another is selling the soap Irish Mist and the Rolls-Royce Silver Mist in Germany, where mist means dung/manure. Then there are misunderstandings of local values. Pepsodent tried to sell whitening toothpaste in Southeast Asia where people chew betel nut purposely to darken their teeth. In Japan, where kitchens often don’t have ovens, international marketers tried to sell a cake mix. They did their research, but they asked merely whether the homemaker would serve the cake, which was already baked when tested, to her family. It’s difficult to remember that we don’t know what we don’t know—until the evidence is there! Through these errors, however, marketers learn the importance of understanding their markets. Acquiring knowledge about a new culture is time-consuming and expensive, but probably less so than recovering from a major marketing disaster. HUMAN RESOURCES Cultural values play key roles in motivating and evaluating employees. In some cultures, individual effort is rewarded, while in others, group effort is more highly valued. Other values that come into play in human resource (HR) contexts relate to our attitudes toward social status. Is social status something we earn through achievements—what we do—or is it a result of our family’s social position—who we are? U.S. employees, for example, expect to be promoted based on their accomplishments; they are often surprised to learn of the significant roles family background and schooling in the “right” institutions play in careers in Great Britain. Different attitudes toward authority, another cultural variable, arise in human resource contexts. Is the manager expected to be the patron, an authoritarian figure responsible for the employees’ welfare? Or the first among equals? Is the annual review understood as a way to credit the employee’s work and help him or her grow, or a means of extracting higher labor output from the worker? The answers to these questions, which have critical relevance to HR practices, are more deeply embedded in cultural values than we are often aware. LO 3-2 Identify the ways culture affects all business activity. “CULTURE IS THE FOUNDATIONAL ARCHITECTURE of OUR MINDS—WE SEE ITS MANIFESTATIONS, but NOT THE TREMENDOUS WORK IT DOES HOLDING SOCIAL SYSTEMS TOGETHER AND HELPING US to SOLVE SHARED PROBLEMS. —Nicholas Athanassiou, P”rofessor, Northeastern University
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