Intercultural marketing: Culture and its influence on the efficiency of Facebook marketing communication

Abstract

The paper deals with intercultural marketing, which is a combination of two different phenomena - marketing and culture. The first objective of the paper lies in providing theoretical definitions of the above-mentioned areas. Subsequently, the aim is to analyse marketing communication of the selected automotive companies and determine its efficiency on social media within the context of cultural differences and cultural forms as their manifestations. A considerable amount of literature has been published on intercultural marketing, but only a few studies have concentrated on the connection with modern communication tools – i.e. social media. The data come from a research conducted online focused on Facebook. In total 2606 posts on twenty Facebook profiles of selected automotive companies were analysed. Our findings show that the use of standardization and adaptation is not related to the efficiency of marketing communication of individual Facebook profiles. One of the factors that determine the efficiency is cultural specifics visible by cultural forms which were interpreted for each selected culture. The contribution and the originality of this paper lies in providing theoretical and practical information about cultural differences on social media not only for marketing managers operating in different cultures, but also for researchers interested in intercultural marketing.

Keywords

• intercultural marketing
• national culture
• cultural forms
• social media
• facebook