A Fact of Life: Cultural Adaptability in Marketing

Digital marketers need to undertake adaptability in order to handle differences in value and attitudes, which ultimately could relate to customer behaviour or affect the implementation of a marketing scheme.

Overseas success comes from cultural adaptability, which includes patience, flexibility and tolerance for other beliefs. In order to do this, marketers will need to thoroughly understand the factors which drive consumer behaviour within different cultures and markets.

Cultural diversity needs to be not only recognised as a fact of life, but as a positive benefit to a business.

Soo, what is culture? Culture is an integrated system of behaviour patterns that have distinguishing characteristics which belong to specific groups. Culture is learned and shared and transmitted from one generation to the next, either from parents to their children, social organisations, special interest groups, as well as schools and via religion. This could be anything that a group thinks, says, does, makes, their customs, language or shared systems of beliefs.

We can view cultural adaptation of marketing through a case study of marketing Aborignal artwork. When marketers sell indigenous Australian art they need to review processes related to cultural sensitivity and adaptation. These artworks are the traditional distinctive dot and cross hatch paints that generally portray Australian native animals. They originated 60,000 years ago and have become a symbol of Australian culture in an art form.

Elements of Culture: Key Cultural Issues

Language

A firm speaking the local language of a market that marketers are trying to break into can make a dramatic difference as language is vital when it comes to effective communication with the specified market. Special attention needs to be paid to differences in language, such as pronunciation and translated meanings.

Marketers must become a part of the market when selling Indigenous artworks, rather than observing from the outside as this ensures important messages are preserved and not lost in translation in the process of marketing these paintings to non-Indigenous people. This is especially important because indigenous art is very much reflective of the unique linguistic ties an artist has with their particular clan.

Religion, Values and attitude

Religion defines the ideals for life and marketers must be aware of the differences not only among the major religions but also within them.

Indigenous art reflects the strong religious ties of Indigenous peoples to the land, the Dreaming and ancestral beings, and their attitudes and values towards kinship, their tribes and the land they belong to. Thus, marketers must be aware of the fact that when they sell artworks, the paintings and art is not to be taken lightly and is to be treated with utmost respect as the art reflect sacred stories unique to different tribes and are an avenue that connects the sacred past, present and future.

Aesthetics

Each culture makes it clear what is and isn’t good taste and what is and isn’t accepted in their society in the form of colours, art and music.

Aesthetics is central to marketing Indigenous art and thus, everything from colour, patterns, designs, materials and the paint used is reflective of their unique cultural heritage and the regional nature of each painting, which should also be mirrored by marketers when advertising or selling artworks

Social Institutions

Social institutions affect the ways in which people relate to each other. Family units will change consumption patterns, and different cultures have different obligations to family.

Artwork is used as a way of expressing identity and social relationships within the Indigenous community. Artists will use ancestrally inherited designs in order to create their art - hence why Indigenous artwork is linked to the Dreaming stories and cultural responsibilities of the individual who created it.

In Australian indigenous cultures kinship networks determine how each different family linkage is relevant to particular Dreaming stories and sites. This will determine which stories an individual can paint and tell within their art.

The need for cultural sensitivity has become significantly more important as the global market has become more vital towards the success of a business. Cultural sensitivity needs to be thoroughly researched in digital marketing because cultural incompetence has the potential to jeopardise millions of dollars in wasted negotiations, sales, and contracts.