International Marketing Issues. Проблемы международного маркетинга, страница 14

5) A useful tool in ensuring that written messages are equivalent in meaning when translated into another language a back-translation method.

5. Look through the text again, make a brief outline of it in writing, and make a short summary according to your plan.

Text 3  Cultural Institutions

1. Before reading the text discuss the following points with your partners.

1) Each society develops certain institutions to determine the relationships between individuals in their day-to-day lives. Which of them do you know?

2)  Why does the international marketer need to know these relationships?

2. Read the text and be ready for the follow-up activities.

Each culture develops institutionalized bases for determining the relationships between individuals in their day-to-day lives. The international marketer needs to know these relationships in order to understand and predict buyer behavior. These institutions include the family, the educational system, the influence and place of peers and peer groups, and the role of women in society.

The role of the family. The family is an important social institution in any society. It always has responsibilities for nurturing small children and passing on to them some of the values of that society. In primitive and/or rural societies, the family is the all-important social focal point, providing food, clothing, shelter, education and acculturation, and a social center. In some of the more sophisticated urban societies the family may provide little more than food and basic acculturation. All other activities have been partially or totally transferred to other groups, especially peers and educational institutions. In such societies, when both parents have full-time jobs, even meals at home may be restricted to the evening meal, and much of this may be prepared and brought in ready-to-eat. Clothing and housing are purchased from outside sources. Education, entertainment, and even much of acculturation come from outside media, either in the home (radio and television) or outside of the home (in schools and through peers). In modern societies, the family has less influence over buying decisions than in the traditional society, and marketing strategies must be adjusted accordingly. The traditional areas of important family influence are in transmitting saving-versus-spending ethics and in establishing the importance of consumption as it reflects personal goals and status. In the traditional family, there are also likely to be more influences and consumption role-modeling via the extended family.

The educational system. The educational system may take many forms. In the industrialized world, it is synonymous with schools. In some African countries, however, schools are more often limited to the role of preparing students for lives in the modern world. Elders and oral historians transmit traditions and values to young people in those cultures. Whatever form the educational system takes, it has a significant impact on the international marketer.

Formal education through schools has a strong relationship to literacy levels within a society. In those countries where schools are provided for the broadest possible group, literacy levels tend to be highest. Compulsory education in the U.S. generally requires completion of at least the eighth grade; in other countries, such as Mexico, it requires only completion of primary grades. Well-educated persons tend to want more sophisticated information about products and tend to use more sources of information when making purchase decisions. The marketer is severely limited in communicating with a market when literacy is low.

Even within industrialized countries, the role of schools as part of the cultural education system varies. In some countries, schools are the responsibility of the church and, as you might expect, in such a system there is relatively more emphasis on transmitting the values of society than on providing the individual with skills. Even within the USA, schools are assuming an increasing role as “transmitters’ of cultural values, as the church and the family decline in importance. In all these cases, it is important for the marketer to understand the nature of the formal educational system, to whom it is available and at what levels, its relative importance in transmitting cultural values compared to other institutions, and its philosophical purpose.