Impacts of cultural environment on marketing of: clothing, software, music recording
Cultural environment is a result of individuals’ behaviors in the society; every place can be identified by their unique culture and some unique behaviors of their individuals. Culture is complex public figure of society that includes most general and some specific behaviors, its environment will influence on everything, for instance, cultural environment will affect of business and their function.
Marketing is one of the business functions that very sensitive for change according to cultural environment, there is wide difference between products in difference cultural environments, it became usual behavior that marketing strategy considering different cultural environments when creating marketing strategy plan.
Cultural environment impacts on marketing directly and indirectly, the direct impact refers to some special events in each society according to their thinking, behavior and religion, for instance, tomorrow (6-11-2011) is Ed-Aldhuha in Islam religion and its holiday for 4 days so that, most of the marketing activities will stop in that period, while, food shops are still active.
There are different ways that cultural environments impact on marketing, as stated by S. Carter (1997):
“…Religious holidays, consumption patterns, economic role of women, caste systems, joint and extended families, institution of the church, market segments…” based on that, all mentioned products can be affected by cultural environment, however, the impact is changing in different environments.
Clothing
Clothing is one of those products that prediction of customers’ onion is not easy, each culture known by their unique clothes and some other global models. Clothes are constrained by (size, color, design, and type of material), in my country, there are more cultural clothes that special to Kurdish culture, and more other clothes that accepted by society, however, people not using clothes with signs (symbols) generally, and for different events, different clothes will be used.
Software
Software generally published under global marketing, the most successful method is website (direct download) and removable Medias (CD, DVD, Flash, etc). Each software came with some cultural signs inherently that related to creator(s), however, objects and functionalities of software is more critical that their cultural side, cultural factors does not affect software marketing in most cases “Explicit consideration of cultural factors does not play a significant role in current software engineering practice” (Gregory E. Kersten and et al., n.d., p.1). the only factor is language that is critical for software to be used by different culture.
Music Recording
There are different types of music recording products: software, studio, and small recorders.
Generally, because of new technologies, simplified music recorders became more popular, everyone can buy music recorder, and most of mobile devices supporting that future.
References:
- Gregory E. Kersten, Stan Matwin, Sunil J. Noronha and Mik A. Kersten (n.d.) The Software for Cultures and the Cultures in Software [Online]. Available from: http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.107.5245&rep=rep1&type=pdf (Accessed: 05 November 2011)
- Fons Trompenaars and Prof. Peter Woolliams (n.d.) A new paradigm for Marketing Across Cultures [Online]. Available from: http://www.7d-culture.nl/Articles/Anew%20paradigm%20for%20Marketing%20Across%20Cultures.pdf (Accessed: 05 November 2011)
- Carter (1997) Chapter 3: The Cultural Environment [Online]. Available from: http://www.fao.org/docrep/W5973E/w5973e07.htm (Accessed: 05 November 2011)
