Marketing communications identifies the demonstration and exchange of information with various stakeholders and business to reach at specific results. Not merely is the goal of marketing communications that the information is understood effectively but it addittionally extends to include persuasion so that the marketing process functions more effectively and effectively. In marketing and sales communications, we are mainly worried about the conveyance of information in regards to a firm's products and services. That is, it identifies the promotional combination used by the firm to be able to communicate its products to its customers. Kotler uses the terms promotional blend and communication combination interchangeably to refer to that element of the marketing combine concerned with promotional activities. Communication of information in international marketing is a good term to be utilized as it suggests a two-way process between the organization and its stakeholders which may help to reduce misunderstandings.
And that is exactly what this newspaper will address; the condition of misunderstanding marketing announcements or information within an international context. The procedure of accurately interacting a message is already difficult in a home environment. However, the "management of international marketing communications is made especially challenging by lots of factors including the difficulty of different market conditions, variations in media availability, languages, ethnic sensitivities, regulations managing advertising and sales promotions and the task of providing enough source of information levels" (Doole and Lowe, 2008). Furthermore, effective and reliable communication in international marketing is important due to geographic and mental health distances between the organization and its own stakeholders.
In this newspaper, we provide a synopsis of the communication barriers that international marketers suffer from when conversing their products and services to global marketplaces.
Why Failures of Marketing communications Occur
International marketing communications have two main purposes. First, is to ensure that the designed message is accurately communicated between your sender and the receiver. Second, is to keep the impact of unintended text messages at the very least since these can have a detrimental influence on the firm's market performance and reputation. Now, the question is what plays a part in the creation of unintended announcements communicated in international marketing? What are the reason why for miscommunication of marketing announcements in the international market arena? Consider Cadbury who "triggered an offence in India and Pakistan with an advertisements to market Temptations chocolates. It proved Kashmir with the strapline "Too good to share". Within this example, mistakes in the utilization of terminology or text messages that may easily be lost in translation as well as insufficient cultural sensitivity can put international marketing communicators at a downside.
Of course lots of the failures of marketing communications are unintentional for the international internet entrepreneur even though they arise. Below are a number of reasons for international marketing communications failures as advised by Doole and Lowe (2008):
Inconsistency of the communication conveyed to customers by personnel at different levels and from different countries and ethnicities.
Different styles of presentation of corporate identity, brand and product image from different departments and country business units which can leave customers perplexed.
A insufficient coordination of communications, such as press releases, advertising campaigns and changes in product standards or pricing across the various country marketplaces.
Failure to appreciate the dissimilarities in the domains of conception (the way the message is grasped) of the sender and the device. The field of notion tends to be influenced significantly by the home reference requirements of both gatherings. This is, perhaps, where in fact the greatest problems occur because avoiding this involves knowledge of different market surroundings, ethnic empathy and the willingness to change the communications programs and processes to local requirements.
We enhance the above list the next, which is discussed in greater detail in the coming sections of this newspaper.
A insufficient knowledge of the marketing communication process and its elements - the sender, the communication, the receiver - in an international marketing framework.
Ignoring legal, linguistic, social, media, production, and cost things to consider which act as barriers to effective communication.
It is argued that most of marketing communications failures is at the control of the company, there are circumstances where failures happen scheduled to exterior factors. No communication can take place with zero failures. However, since "the potency of promotional strategy can be jeopardized by so many factors a marketer must be certain that no controllable affects are overlooked".
The MARKETING AND SALES COMMUNICATIONS Process
As we have just talked about, international marketing and sales communications may fail for a number of reasons. Among these reasons is too little understanding the marketing communications process in an international marketing context. In fact, "those international professionals who understand the communications process are better prepared to control the variety they face in growing an international promotional program" (Cateora and Graham, 2008).
We adopt the marketing and sales communications model suggested by Cateora and Graham (2008) to describe the international marketing communications process. The process consists of the following elements: 1. An information source (sender), 2. Encoding, 3. A message channel, 4. Decoding, 5. Recipient, 6. Responses, 7. Noise. In this section, we are looking at each one of these elements and the factors that effect them as they relate with the international framework.
The need for talking about this model lies in the fact that a lot of promotional or communication problems in international marketing are attributed to "one or several of these steps not properly reflecting cultural influences or even to a general lack knowledge about the target market" (Cateora and Graham, 2008). Furthermore, "the model's relevance is the fact one or all steps in the process, cultural factors, or the marketer's self-reference criterion make a difference the best success of the communication" (Cateora and Graham, 2008). Thus, you will observe that much of the discussion of this model requires social factors. The first and most obvious evidence of that is that, based on the model, each one of the sender and the recipient is locate in some other cultural context. Which means that the meaning is encoded in a single culture and decoded in another. Inability to consider cultural differences at this level can boost the possibility of misunderstandings and an inadequate communication process.
Let us now consider each element of the model and exactly how it should be considered within an international marketing framework.
The information source (sender): is represented by a professional who is trying to sell or promote a product/service to an international market. Due to cultural variations in perception, it is often the truth that the real international market's needs and the marketer's perception of them do not coincide. This is intensified when the professional relies more on his/her self-reference criterion (SRC) than on effective research. SRC can be defined as "an unconscious reference to one's own ethnical values, experience, and knowledge as a basis for decisions" (Cateora and Graham, 2008). Therefore, the marketing expert should not expect that just because a product offers well in one country or culture, it will be similarly successful in another. "The sender needs to study device characteristics before encoding the communication to be submitted order to accomplish maximum impact. " (Czinkota and Ronakainen, 1995).
Encoding: is when the message to be communicated is converted into a symbolic form such that it can be properly grasped by the recipient. Naturally, this proper understanding will not always take place, not in international marketing. This is because social perceptions of factors such as color, timing, prices, beliefs, humor, tastes and appropriateness of spokesperson vary across countries. For example, pertaining to the interpretation of colors "white is the color of delivery and in the Western world usually refers to happy event, whereas in China it symbolized mourning. Conversely, the color black symbolizes death in the West, perhaps because its darkness implies fears that sunlight will not come back, whereas it can be an every day color in China" (Usunier and Anne Lee, 2009). There are also "problems of literacy, mass media availability, and types of marketing" (Cateora and Graham, 2008) that create issues for the international internet marketer as of this encoding step.
Message programs: refer to the sales team and/or advertising marketing used by the marketing expert (the sender) to convey the encoded note to the recipient. Czinkota and Ronkainen (1995) claim that: Complications in international marketing may come up if a particular medium is unavailable for commercial purposes, such as radio in a few of Northern European countries. Other types of complications are the banning of advertising for certain product categories, such as cigarette advertising in the majority of Europe, and the fact that some marketing practices may well not be allowed, such as door-to-door advertising in France. International marketers should retain in mind the ease of access of the medium to the recipient. For example, using the internet as a medium in a certain country when only a small percentage of the mark audience has usage of the internet is no effective or effective decision.
Decoding: refers to the interpretation by the receiver of the symbolism sent through the communication route by the sender. It is argued that decoding errors are generally created by poor encoding.
The device: is displayed by the clients in the international market who are targeted by the message and receive it. Here also it is argued that problems at the recipient end of the process are created by a blend of "an incorrect message resulting from incorrect understanding of use patterns, poor encoding creating a meaningless communication, poor marketing selection that will not get the communication to the recipient, or inaccurate decoding by the device so that the note is garbled or wrong" (Cateora and Graham, 2008). However, I also think the receiver's social record intensified by the SRC can impact what sort of communication is interpreted.
Feedback: information about the potency of the communication which moves from the device back again to the sender for the latter to evaluate the potency of the communication process. Feedback is highlights the value of having a two-way communication process, especially in international marketing where as it offers the internet marketer the opportunity to find out more on the receiver's social background and perception. The task here, however, is to come up with a proper feedback systems where both the sender and the recipient can exchange information without being affected by the factors impacting the initial communication process yet again.
Noise: extraneous and distracting stimuli that impact the six steps mentioned previously. These are usually uncontrollable factors such as "competitive advertising, other sales staff, and misunderstanding at the obtaining end" that influence the potency of the communication. Furthermore, Czinkota and Ronkainen (1995) claim that:
In the international marketing context, noise might be considered a bad telephone connection, failure to express a quotation in the inquirer's system of money and measurement, or an extremely cluttered medium such as Italian television, where all adverts are aired in one half-hour period each night. A valid inquiry from abroad may not be looked at seriously by an international internet entrepreneur because of noise of consisting of low quality newspaper, grammatical errors, or a general appearance unlike home correspondence. The international marketing consultancy should be most alert to cultural noise. Having less language skills may hinder successful discussions, whereas translation problems may render a promotional campaign or brochure worthless. Similarly, nonverbal words and its poor interpretation could cause problems. For example, in the United States, lack of eye contact is a signal that something is wrong. This isn't actually so in Japan, where in fact the cultural design of communication involves markedly less eyes contact.
Other Kinds of Barriers to Effective Communication
In this section we explore further barriers that make effective communication in international marketplaces challenging. It is true that several communications tools exist in the promotional mixture of international marketing such as sales campaigns, pr, business and trade journals, direct mail and personal offering, but you'll observe that the barriers below are more related to international advertising than the tools just talked about. We briefly explain five main barriers as discussed by Cateora and Graham (2007):
Legal Constraints: included in these are laws that relate with controlling comparative advertising. The international professional needs to be aware that these laws change across cultures. For instance, while comparative advertising is illegal in Germany, it is approved in other Europe such as the UK, Ireland, Spain and Portugal. Legal constraints also include restrictions on the advertising of specific products such as smoking cigarettes, pharmaceuticals, toys and liquors. Furthermore, there are several constraints with regard to advertising on TV such as size and the amount of television advertisements allowed. For instance, "In Kuwait, the government-controlled Television set network allows only 32 minutes of advertising each day, at night" (Cateora and Graham, 2008). Some countries also have placed taxes on advertising in such a way that different broadcast press charge different taxes ratios. This might rob international marketers with their creative independence in advertising. New regulations are also being released in the European union in regards to to restricting advertising on the internet. However, given the type of the internet, this appears to be a challenging activity for legal regulators.
Linguistic Limits: "Language is one of the major obstacles to effective communication through advertising" (Cateora and Graham, 2008). This does not only involve the problem of different dialects across different countries, but it addittionally involves the life of varied dialects, accents, colloquial vocabulary, idioms and metaphors which usually are usually lost in translation and may lead to miscommunication. Even pronunciation, words, solitary sentences and simple principles may be misinterpreted when translated in one language to some other because of cultural traditions and education factors. For example, "a company marketing tomato paste in the centre East discovered that in Arabic the saying tomato paste means tomato glue" (Cateora and Graham, 2008). Another issue that relates to linguistic limitations is that of low literacy in some countries as well as the lifestyle of multiple dialects in a country such as Switzerland; small but has four different dialects.
Cultural Diversity: "The problems associated with connecting to people in diverse civilizations present one of the great creative obstacles in advertising" (Cateora and Graham, 2008). This is largely because of the fact that ethnical factors have an effect on one's perception of varied phenomena, or marketing announcements in our case. Much of perception is shaped by one's cultural values, beliefs, traditions and customs, and are hard to overcome. Once in another culture, the perceptual platform differs and the belief of the meaning itself varies. Take the example of General Mills when it first presented instant wedding cake mixes. While customers in the United States and England perceived the product as keeping them from genuine baking and therefore began having guilt thoughts, customers in Japan identified the product's advertising on Television set as an insult when it promoted that making a cakes is as easy as making grain. For your details, the Japanese are not known for baking and they perceive making rice as an art. International marketers also needs to consider the life of subcultures when advertising in a certain culture or a physical area numerous subcultures. Furthermore, they ought to note that though people tend to cling to their heritages, in addition they undergo the procedure of changing traditions. This may actually create a chance for international marketers to present services when communicated carefully.
Media Constraints: these manifest themselves in supply, cost and coverage problems associated with advertising in international marketplaces. That is why other communications tools exist as the methods mentioned earlier. "A marketer's imagination is obviously challenged when a television commercial is limited to 10 showings a year with no two exposures deeper than 10 times, as is the truth in Italy" (Cateora and Graham, 2008).
Production and Cost Limits: these constraints offer with such issues as poor creation or the need for low-cost reproduction of advertisements in certain countries. For example, "newsprint is of such poor in China that a color ad employed by Kodak in the West an option. Kodak's solution has been to print a single-sheet color put in as a newspaper supplementation" (Cateora and Graham, 2008).
Conclusion
The purpose of this newspaper was to provide a synopsis of the obstacles to effective communication in the international marketing market. By communication we meant the promotional mixture that marketers might follow in the international marketing area. Instead of exploring the tools found in international marketing communications, we centered on the factors that might prevent effective and successful delivery of the marketing note designed to be send through these tools. These factors included, to a huge extent, cultural variables. Furthermore, there are factors such as legal constraints, vocabulary, media limitations and cost and production limitations. In my opinion, the most important of the factors are the cultural factors as they impact the perceptual style of each individual and thus affect the actions and decision used by that each. We also emphasized on the marketing and sales communications model and how international issues arise at each aspect for the reason that model.
The limitations of this paper rest in the fact that it is not exhaustive of the topic and merely provides an idea of a few of the problems that internet marketer have to handle in communicating information about their companies and market offerings and attempts across international market segments.
